
Class 6 R \ -L5- 
Book .5(g EiL 



GopyrightN°_ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 






Personal Religion and 
the Social Awakening 



By 

ROSS L. FINNEY, Ph.D. 

Professor of Philosophy and Economics in 
Illinois Wesleyan University 




Cmritmatt : 

JENNINGS AND GRAHAM 

EATON AND MAINS 



cfi *X- 



D<« 



V- 



Copyright, 1913. by 
Jennings and Gr shorn 



©CI.A354271 



Contents 



Chapter Page 

I. The Social Ideals of the Christian 

Faith, 9 

II. The Social Effects of Individual 

Morals, ------ 33 

III. Social Christianity Begins at Home, - 49 

IV. The Social Harvest of Materialism, 65 

V. The Social Fruits of the Spiritual 

Life, 81 

VI. The Social Benefits of Self-Denial, 97 

VII. The Social Function of the Church, 111 

VIII. The Social Need of a Religious 

Awakening, 133 



Preface 

THE object of this little book is to harmonize the 
divergent tendencies of personal religion and 
social religion, to show that they are not at all an- 
tagonistic, but mutually supplementary; to make it 
clear that we need the ideals and ends emphasized 
by the social awakening to motivate our personal 
religion, and that the social awakening needs the 
emotions and enthusiasms of personal religion to 
vitalize it. 

We need the insight to discern that personal sal- 
vation is a vital requisite to social salvation; and 
that, if the social hopes of the present age are to be 
realized, a revival of personal religion must sweep 
through our civilization. 

Ross L. Finney. 

Bloomington, Illinois , 

August, 19 1 3. 



I 

The Social Ideals of the Christian Faith 






The Social Ideals of the Christian Faith 

THE Hebrews were, in many respects, a unique 
people ; and just because they were unique they 
made an invaluable contribution to civilization. 
The respect in which they were unique was religion, 
and it was their religion that furnished the basis of 
their contribution to the future. And one of the 
characteristics of their peculiar religion was that 
they looked for a golden age in the future. The 
Greeks, on the other hand, and indeed all other an- 
cient peoples, thought of the golden age as in the 
past. But this Hebrew idea, that the golden age, 
the ideal age, is in the future, runs like a golden 
thread through all their religious literature, is a de- 
termining fact in their history, and is one of the 
most important elements of their contribution to the 
future. 

That golden age which they dreamed of in the 
future they called the Kingdom of God. Into that 
ideal of the Kingdom which was to come they gath- 
ered together all the good things they could conceive 
of. Devoutly, reverently, almost passionately they 

9 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

expected them all to be realized when the Kingdom 
of God should be established upon earth. It was 
to be set up with its capital at Jerusalem. Its King 
was to be a scion of the house of David. All their 
enemies were to be expelled, all their social ills eradi- 
cated. It was to be indeed an ideal kingdom upon 
earth, a veritable religious Utopia. 

This message is sounded forth by all their 
prophets. Not one of them but makes the Messianic 
Kingdom, the Kingdom of God, a vital note in his 
message and uses it as a motive in all his preaching. 
It was the goal of their history, the inspiration of 
their faith, the very center of their theocratic na- 
tional religion. 

And this phrase, "the Kingdom of God," Jesus 
seized upon to use as a vehicle for His message. 

Every one who lived in Jesus' time was familiar 
with the term and knew full well all the hope that 
was expressed in it. At this time, perhaps more than 
at any other period of Hebrew history, there was a 
passionate longing in the hearts of all the people 
for the realization of the Kingdom. With them it 
merged the enthusiasm and earnestness that we feel 
in both patriotism and religion, for religion was 
always patriotic with the Jew, and patriotism was 
always religious. And so the Kingdom-hope was 

10 



The Social Ideals of the Christian Faith 

the passion of the age in which Jesus pronounced 
His message. It was for this reason that He seized 
upon the term to use it as a vehicle for the expression 
of what He had to teach. 

But He differed from the Hebrews as to how 
the Kingdom was to be realized. He meant to in- 
dorse their belief that when the Kingdom should 
come, all conceivable good things should be realized 
in the world, all social and political ills should be 
at an end, and the world should be, indeed, an ideal 
place to live in. All that He intended to indorse. 
But He took issue with them as to how the Kingdom 
of God was to come. The Pharisees believed that 
men could do nothing to hasten its coming, but that 
it would come in God's good time, and come be- 
cause He should perform some wonderful miracle 
and set it up upon earth. The Zealots, on the other 
hand, believed, to use Ben Franklin's phrase, that 
"God helps them that help themselves." They were 
for demonstrating their fitness for the Kingdom by 
driving out the Romans ; and then they believed the 
Kingdom of God would be sent. But Jesus indorsed 
neither of these methods of bringing in the Kingdom 
of God. He definitely repudiated the methods ad- 
vocated by the Zealots, and gave little encourage- 
ment to the ideas that the Pharisees held as to how 

ii 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

the Kingdom of God should come. He said, to 
paraphrase His words, "Change your lives, be good 
and just, love God and man; behold, the Kingdom is 
already among you; believe this good news, and it 
will be here." 

When we come to understand the message of 
Jesus, therefore, we discern clearly that it was not 
only a message of personal salvation, but a message 
of social salvation as well. He looked forward to 
and taught His disciples to pray for the time when 
the Kingdom of God should come, the will of God 
be done upon earth as it is done in heaven, and the 
whole world should become a veritable heaven upon 
earth. He taught His disciples that this Kingdom 
of Heaven was to grow like the seed of a plant, 
till it should shelter the whole earth. He taught 
His disciples that the Kingdom of God was like 
yeast put into the world, that ultimately it may 
leaven the whole lump. This was the sublimest 
Utopian dream of all the ages; and in His devotion 
to this dream, this social ideal, He was willing to die 
rather than retract one word of His program, one 
iota of the means for realizing it. Thus He voiced 
more clearly than any other of the Hebrews this 
hope that the world is gradually to grow better and 
better until it approximates the ideal condition. 

12 



The Social Ideals of the Christian Faith 

His disciples adopted His view as a matter of 
course, but it may well be doubted whether they ap- 
preciated its full significance. There seems to be 
some indication in the New Testament that, owing 
to some extent to the influence of the Pharisees, they 
expected it to come in some sort of marvelous mani- 
festation. And Paul, it is certain, looked for an 
apocalyptic Kingdom when, at the recoming of Je- 
sus, amidst a miraculous display in the heavens 
above and the earth beneath, the world should come 
to an end and a new age should dawn. The early 
Christians, moreover, were actuated in a great de- 
gree by this expectation of the world's betterment 
or the world's end; and the early literature is full 
of it. But little by little it faded away as a social 
ideal, becoming only a millennial dream. Pagan 
practices were decaying and decomposing the insti- 
tutions of the time. Civilization was hopelessly de- 
cadent, and after a century or two Christians came 
to despair of transforming and transfiguring the 
world that now is. And then, too, the philosophy 
of Plato, which little by little had been woven into 
theology, withdrew Christian life and hope from 
the world, instead of trying to save it. And so it 
came about that Christians set up their monasteries, 
lived their Christian lives apart from the world, re- 

13 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

signed themselves to the decay and decadence of the 
age, and comforted themselves with the hope only 
of their own personal salvation in the spiritual world 
beyond the grave, and with the dream of a distant 
millennium. Thus social Christianity was forgotten, 
and only the immortal hope and the millennial 
dream remained. The Kingdom-hope lay crushed 
under the debris of Roman civilization, smothered 
in the abstractions of a Platonized theology. True, 
there were those in all ages in whose hearts burned 
the desire to make the world better, and instinctively 
individuals and the Church felt its irrepressible mo- 
tivation at times ; but so far as its explicit expression 
in the creeds or its overt avowal as a Christian 
motive are concerned, it lay buried for centuries. 

It is only recently, in the closing years of the 
nineteenth century and in the beginning years of the 
twentieth century, that the full gospel, in both its 
aspects, the individual and the social, is being set 
forth again, to the inspiration of men's souls. The 
slogan "Back to Jesus" is restoring it to us, or rather 
is an expression of its restoration to us. The King- 
dom-hope is here among us again in all its early 
Christian grandeur, inspiring the souls of our youth 
as they could be inspired in this age by no other 
motive whatsoever. 

14 



The Social Ideals of the Christian Faith 

There are various reasons why it is revived in 
this twentieth century. In the first place it is due 
to the rise of democracy. Aristotle taught that the 
lower classes are as much below the higher classes 
of men as the brutes are below human beings. But 
Jesus taught the brotherhood of man. Nevertheless 
the world believed Aristotle rather than Jesus for 
many sad and dreary centuries, until Rousseau pro- 
claimed the principle that "all men are created free 
and equal, and endowed by their Creator with cer- 
tain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness." The insight of this 
great idea threw all Europe into political ferment, 
set in motion movements of modern democracy in 
Europe and America, and got itself cast in the form 
just quoted in our great National document. And 
so democracy has emphasized the fact, as it was not 
emphasized for centuries, that the brotherhood of 
man is true and that Christian principles ought to 
reign in the realm of government, and therefore 
must reign and shall reign. Democracy has taught 
us that "a man's a man for a' that;" that the 
brotherhood of man, as taught by Jesus, is to fill 
the earth, and that the kingdoms of this earth are 
to become the Kingdom of our Lord and His Christ. 

Within the last few years the Christian Church 

15 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

itself has caught the inspiration from rising democ- 
racy and is voicing forth the message of humanity. 
The change has come about in this way. In the 
eighties Tolstoi startled Western civilization with 
the assertion that our institutions are based upon 
force and retaliation rather than upon love and for- 
giveness. He challenged us, therefore, to Christian- 
ize our institutions. That set the world to inquir- 
ing, as it had never inquired before, what the appli- 
cation of Christianity to our institutions — political, 
social, and industrial — might mean. Then Ruskin 
voiced a similar message, and the world listened to 
both of these great literary prophets of social re- 
ligion. 

About twenty years ago, perhaps a little more, 
there began to appear in America a series of books 
of great religious significance. The first of these 
was "Applied Christianity," by Washington Glad- 
den. He called for the application of the golden 
rule to the labor problem. In the nineties other 
books appeared. The first of these was a book by 
Professor Ely, of the University of Wisconsin, on 
the "Social Aspects of Christianity." In this book, 
which, by the way, was prescribed for the required 
reading of young ministers of a great denomination, 
Professor Ely applied the principles of Christianity 

16 



The Social Ideals of the Christian Faith 

not only to the labor problem, but to various other 
problems of our economic life. How that book set 
the young ministers of America to thinking as to 
what Christianity means to the world as well as to 
the individual! Next came Peabody's "Jesus Christ 
and the Social Question" and Shailer Mathews' 
"The Social Teachings of Jesus." There is hardly 
a clergyman in America who has not read some one 
of these books. But the book of all books that 
startled the clergy is the one by Rauschenbusch, pub- 
lished in 1907, entitled, "Christianity and the Social 
Crisis." Young ministers of America read the book 
with pulsing hearts, so intense was the excitement 
of their inspiration as they saw what Christianity 
might do for this old world if it were but freed from 
the handicaps of dogmatism and ecclesiasticism, and 
set free to exert its influence upon the institutions of 
life and society. 

Thus the clergy have been awakened, and they 
in turn have awakened the laity. As a result the 
thought of Christians is aflame with these prophetic 
messages, and the social application of Christianity 
has become almost a passion. 

But this passion is to be found not only in the 
hearts and souls of the clergy and those who listen 
to the clergy, but it appears also in many contempo- 
2 I 7 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

raneous phases of our National life. There never 
was a time in all the history of the world when there 
were being so many enterprises and institutions in- 
augurated for the benefit of humanity, for the amel- 
ioration of the conditions of human life, as to-day. 
Any man or woman who remembers back as far as 
the Civil War could make a list of not less than one 
hundred institutions, organizations, and enterprises 
that have been started since then for the sole pur- 
pose of bettering the world and benefiting humanity, 
increasing justice, and ameliorating the conditions of 
mankind. 

The development of the sciences of Economics 
and Sociology, moreover, and the activities of phi- 
lanthropy at the dictate of these sciences, is a mani- 
festation of the passion engendered in the minds of 
all the people by the Kingdom-hope. There are 
thousands of young men who have gone into these 
lines of study, research, and work, instead of into 
the ministry, but have gone into them with precisely 
the same spirit as their fathers went into the min- 
istry. And there are thousands of men who have 
never thought of the ministry as a profession who 
with a noble enthusiasm are devoting their lives to 
these different forms of activity for the betterment 
of humanity and the uplift of mankind. The pas- 

18 



The Social Ideals of the Christian Faith 

sion even threatens to sweep over into the field of 
politics, and we have the spectacle of u Social Jus- 
tice," a new term coined to express this humanita- 
rian spirit of the age, becoming the campaign slogan 
of a great political party. 

The spirit of the age, then, is Christian, in this 
sense, at least. Men's religious fervor is moved 
by this great desire, this exalted purpose of making 
the world better. All men are praying, "Thy King- 
dom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in 
heaven." Some of them, perhaps, may not realize 
that their work for human betterment is Christian, 
that their aspirations and their ambitions are Chris- 
tian, however Christian they may be. Would it not 
be well to let them understand that their work is a 
contribution to the Kingdom of God upon earth, 
and that their lives are really Christian in their ac- 
tivities and motives? Why should not a class of 
students, studying the great problems of modern 
life — problems the solution of which will bring to 
the world a larger measure of justice, enlarge the 
opportunities of childhood, widen the outlook of 
womanhood, and bless the world — why should they 
not come to such a classroom with as religious an 
enthusiasm as they come to the prayer-meeting? 
And is it unfitting that after a course devoted to 

J 9 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

the study of such subjects as Poverty, its causes and 
cure; Crime, the forces that generate it; the Labor 
Movement, and the justice and injustice involved in 
it; the Trust Problem, and the burden that is un- 
justly laid upon the shoulders of so large a propor- 
tion of our population, they should reverently thank 
God that they have learned how the keenest minds 
of the age propose to realize in larger measure the 
Kingdom of God in the earth? 

The Church, reformers, students, philanthro- 
pists, men of the world, statesmen, are all working 
together in this wonderful age of ours to transform 
and transfigure the world. We all come to feel that 
it is not enough to save our individual selves from 
some hell that threatens us hereafter; we also want 
to save this old world itself from the hell that has 
blighted it for centuries, and bring to actuality a 
heaven upon earth. The forces that are operating 
in this world of ours, religious and otherwise, mak- 
ing for this consummation, are powerful forces in- 
deed; and those who understand the signs of the 
times are confident that we are just upon the dawn 
of a new and larger era, when the institutions of 
this world — political, social, and economic — shall 
be transformed so that we shall in larger measure 
at least actualize and exemplify the Golden Rule. 

20 



The Social Ideals of the Christian Faith 

For there are two kinds of justice, two kinds of 
righteousness. There are hand-made justice and 
righteousness, and there are machine-made justice 
and righteousness. In an age like ours, when so 
many things are made by machinery, it ought to be 
easy for us to discern that justice or injustice, right- 
eousness or unrighteousness, may be machine-made. 
Business corporations, municipal governments, penal 
institutions, educational systems, public-service fran- 
chises, legal precedents, tariff schedules, fiscal con- 
stitutions, city slums, competitive industry, and other 
social, political, and economic organizations are all 
great machines, producing justice or injustice. 

It is not enough, therefore, that individuals 
should do right; it is also necessary that our ma- 
chinery of society should be converted, and that all 
our institutions should either practice righteousness 
or else cease to exist as institutions. We have al- 
ready destroyed 9 the institution of slavery, because it 
was an institution that could not possibly practice 
the Golden Rule. There may be other institutions 
whose resignations we shall have to insist upon ac- 
cepting, because they, too, are incapable of prac- 
ticing the Golden Rule. And there are many of our 
institutions that we should readjust and modify so 
that they, as institutions, may practice, like good 

21 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

men, the Golden Rule. This will never be a Chris- 
tian world till the institutions as well as individuals 
practice justice and Christianity. To convert our 
institutions may be said, therefore, to be the unique 
Christian task of the age. 

The task, moreover, appeals to the imagination 
of our generation. Thousands of young Christians, 
though unmotivated by fear or hope of a hereafter, 
are profoundly, even passionately, desirous of in- 
vesting their lives in behalf of the coming Kingdom 
which their faith beholds afar. 

But right here their difficulty begins; for they 
do not know what to do in behalf of that Kingdom. 
They would gladly be missionaries, or slum workers, 
or start a social settlement. They eagerly sing, 

"I '11 go where You want me to go, dear Lord, 
Over mountain, or plain, or sea;" 

but, unfortunately, the way is closed, and they de- 
spair of ever being able to serve the Kingdom. 

So we must confess the Kingdom-hope is at a 
disadvantage in being rather remote and abstract 
for the practical religious purposes of all the people. 
We may dream and exult ever so much over a world 
growing better, but unless we can somehow bring 
social service down into close contact with the de- 

22 



The Social Ideals of the Christian Faith 

tails of our lives and actually live by it as a motive, 
one of two things will happen : we shall either grow 
discouraged at the futility of our lives, or else we 
shall abstract our religion from our lives, praying 
and singing and exulting over a Kingdom-dream 
that we can only dream about, while meantime our 
daily lives are prayerless, visionless, and godless. 

And this danger seriously menaces the social-sal- 
vation propaganda of the present day. We are all 
in danger of being like the child who, when asked 
by his father at family worship, "Where is our part 
of the Kingdom of God?" glibly replied, "Up in the 
moon." Child-labor legislation, industrial accident 
insurance, social settlements, and amelioration of the 
rigors of competition are, to most of us, most of 
the time, to all intents and purposes, up in the moon. 
Unless we see some closer-at-home opportunity to 
serve the Kingdom than is offered by most programs 
of social reform, the Kingdom-motive will be to us 
little more than an abstraction. And with many, 
devotion to that abstraction is about all the religious 
experience they have. 

The father just referred to, a few mornings later, 
tried again. He had intended to teach his six-year- 
old son that the Kingdom is among the good folks 
that we know. But this time the child answered 

23 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

as promptly as before, with sweet accents of childish 
sureness, "Down in our hearts." 

Sure enough ! Down in our hearts ! The father 
was nonplused for a moment; but he presently dis- 
cerned that the child's innocence was wiser than his 
wisdom, and he let the answer stand. Down in our 
hearts ! 

The most important religious insight, the in- 
sight requisite to the vitality of social religion and 
the success of our civilization, is the insight to dis- 
cern that if the Kingdom of God is to come in the 
earth, it must first come in our hearts. Social sal- 
vation can only be realized through individual sal- 
vation. The social awakening must be realized by 
a revival of personal religion. 

The truth still remains that our institutions need 
to be readjusted and reorganized, but it will do little 
good for our institutions to be converted unless the 
persons who compose them are converted too. We 
can not make good institutions out of bad folks, 
however perfectly the institutions are organized; 
and if we are to have good folks to build into in- 
stitutions worthy of the Kingdom of God, they must, 
above all, have the Kingdom of God down in their 
hearts. The brotherhood of man is impossible with- 
out brotherly men. A good family is impossible 

24 



The Social Ideals of the Christian Faith 

without good folks. The principality of the king- 
dom in which each of us lives is his own home, and 
there is no service to the kingdom that begins to 
compare in importance with making that home an 
ideal principality of the Kingdom. Local units are 
as vital to the Kingdom as to democracy. 

Moreover, just as we can not have a good 
family-life without the Kingdom of God in our 
hearts, so we can not have a stable National life 
without the Kingdom of God in the hearts of the 
people. Have not we in America had enough of 
stealing and vulgar, wanton selfishness in politics? 
Is it not high time that our bland, blind optimism 
be at an end with respect to this democracy of ours? 
It has not passed its experimental age. It is not 
a foregone conclusion that democracy is a success in 
America ; and American democracy certainly will not 
succeed unless we can get honest men to run it. 

No doubt the logic of Jesus' teachings calls for 
the Christianization of our social institutions. No 
doubt we must reduce the Master's message to 
fundamental principles, such as human brotherhood, 
and then apply those principles not only to persons 
and intimate personal relations, but to institutions 
as well. Thus slavery as a system was incom- 
patible with Jesus' principles. So was the divine 

25 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

right of kings. So are, no doubt, many of the insti- 
tutions of to-day. Let each institution be subjected 
to the test — that is the use to which Christianity must 
be put — and the world will never be Christian other- 
wise. 

Nevertheless it is an interesting and, in the light 
of the present social movement, a curious fact that 
the great Teacher Himself never carried His own 
message that far. He devoted His attention not 
to institutions, but to individuals. His immediate 
interest was in personal salvation; the social salva- 
tion He foresaw as an ultimate result. For example, 
an industrial system closely akin to slavery existed 
in Palestine in Jesus' day, and the Roman Empire 
was full of it; but there is not one word against the 
system in the Gospels. A tyrannous foreign power 
unjustly taxed and oppressed the people — but not 
one word do we read of political revolution. An 
almost hopelessly effete ecclesiastical system pre- 
vailed; but it was the Pharisees He condemned, not 
their institution. The nearest He came to prescrib- 
ing for any social organ was when He declared so 
unequivocally for the inviolability of marriage. He 
did not so much as make the slightest provision for 
institutionalizing the movement to which His very 
life was given. 

26 



The Social Ideals of the Christian Faith 

Instead, He loved men and women, served the 
people, and called individuals to repentance, declar- 
ing that the leaven would ultimately leaven the whole 
lump. Love one another, return good for evil, visit 
the sick, feed the hungry, forgive your enemies, trust 
in God, turn from sin; thus the Kingdom is to come. 

Let us not, therefore, forget the Master. In 
our entirely commendable enthusiasm to reform, as 
the logic of His teaching demands, the un-Christian 
institutions of society, let us not neglect that which 
He so explicitly directed, to seek the salvation of our 
own souls and the souls of our contemporaries, the 
regeneration of our lives and theirs. For nothing 
is more certain than that "social organization can 
never be of a higher type than the individual char- 
acter and intelligence of the members of the group 
warrant; and only by raising the intelligence and 
character of the individual members of society can 
a higher type of social life permanently result."* 

Moreover, let us remind ourselves that our 
Lord's appeal was essentially and superlatively a 
religious appeal. His means of regenerating char- 
acter was through personal religion. And the re- 
ligion of Jesus Christ that came streaming into the 
effete civilization of the first century, a civilization 

♦Ellwood's "Sociology and Modern Social Problems," page 311. 

27 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

sick to nausea with philosophical speculation, and 
world-weary with the burden of vice and pessimism, 
was a personal religion, with a personal God, a per- 
sonal Savior, personal repentance, love, faith, and 
salvation. And just because it was a personal re- 
ligion it created a new force in society, and generated 
a new tendency in civilization. 

So must it ever be. The most effective means 
of bringing the Kingdom of God into men's hearts, 
and so bringing the world to the Kingdom of God, 
is personal religion. 

Personal religion, because we are individual per- 
sons, and after all love does not thrive on abstrac- 
tions. It must tie us to our housemates and our near 
neighbors as well as to society. Religion, because 
we are religious persons, and faith, too, is not satis- 
fied with abstractions; it must show us the way to 
God and save our souls as well as the social order. 
Religious faith and love are the sources from which 
that goodness springs which alone can save the 
world. Psychology recognizes that fact. Both edu- 
cational and social theory build upon the principle 
that religion motivates morality as nothing else can. 
And we all do know that those praying fathers and 
mothers of ours, whose faith was vital, had a sta- 
bility of moral character that we shall fail to develop 

28 



The Social Ideals of the Christian Faith 

in our children unless we transmit alive to them our 
fathers' faith. And upon the character of individu- 
als depends not only the coming of the Kingdom 
for which we dream, but the very security of the 
social capital we now possess. 

The enthusiasms of the social awakening are 
spreading rapidly and widely in America to-day. 
And it is well. Young men and women are conse- 
crating themselves to the service of the Kingdom. 
Men are selecting their life-work or devoting their 
means and leisure to these great ideals. But if they 
are to serve effectively the Kingdom of the Christ, 
that Christ Himself must abide in their hearts. His 
forgiveness, His peace, His love must fill them, 
bless them, inspire them, and send them forth to 
do His will. For by an irreverent, sordid, or im- 
moral life they can tear down more, much more, 
than their work or their philanthropy can possibly 
build up. And withal they will fail to really find 
themselves. But with Christ the Savior in the house 
of their souls they may become indeed servants in 
the house of the world. 



29 



II 

The Social Effects of Individual Morals 



The Social Effects of Individual Morals 

THE western religious world has during the last 
few years been roused to a pitch of exultant 
enthusiasm over the Christian ideal of the coming 
Kingdom of God upon the earth. This social ver- 
sion of the Christian faith dreams of an ideal world 
that is to be gradually realized. Justice is to grow; 
the social evils that discount the value of life are to 
be gradually eliminated; peace, prosperity, happi- 
ness, and good will are ultimately to dominate 
human life. The social order, gradually Christian- 
ized, is, little by little, to approximate perfection. 

This dream has aptly been called the Kingdom- 
hope. The means by which it is to be realized are 
changes in laws and institutions whereby such con- 
crete evils as child-labor, the toil of women in fac- 
tories, the social evil, industrial accidents, and other 
like monstrosities are to be done away. In short, 
social reorganization. The Christian who enter- 
tains this hope and aspires to help in its realization 
thinks of some form of social service, such as slum* 
wtirk, prison-reform, dr philanthropy, as the imme- 

3 33 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

diate program in which he himself, if he could but 
participate, might help in the realization of the com- 
ing Kingdom. The Church, under the inspiration of 
this ideal, is itself agitating and undertaking various 
forms of social service. All sorts of social reforms 
are being suggested, and agitators abound. At the 
heart of the modern social aspiration is the demand 
for a more equitable distribution of wealth. It is 
everywhere felt and frankly avowed that this is pre- 
requisite to all of the other parts of the social pro- 
gram, and many believe that all the other ideal con- 
ditions will follow as an inevitable consequence if 
only an equitable distribution of wealth can be se- 
cured. 

But it may be well to raise the question whether 
a materialistic and external program of this char- 
acter can reach the heart of the matter. For man 
is not merely external; there is also the internal 
aspect of his nature. His environment is not merely 
a material world, it is also a social world and a 
world of ideals. It has been aptly said: "Our ma- 
terial progress can never add anything to the real 
happiness and social betterment of the race. On the 
contrary, it is possible to conceive of a society in 
which every one has an economic surplus — a society 
rolling in wealth, approximately equally divided, and 

34 



The Social Effects of Individual Morals 

yet one in which human misery in its worst forms 
of vice, crime, self-destruction, and pessimism pre- 
vail." Something else is necessary besides social 
reorganization, however important this may be in 
itself. 

To imagine that these external changes alone 
can give us a perfect world constitutes us dreamers 
like those of the Renaissance period, who vainly 
imagined that familiarity with the ancient classics 
and insight into ultimate metaphysical mysteries 
could actualize a Utopian world. But the dreams 
of the Renaissance failed tragically of realization, 
and from these dreamers of an earlier day we may 
well learn a lesson. An ideal world can only be 
realized in proportion to the morality and intelli- 
gence of the masses of the common people. What 
we need to-day is not only to reorganize our insti- 
tutions on more moral lines, but also a deepening 
of the moral life of individuals. The greatest need 
of the age, and the most important requisite to the 
realization of the Kingdom of God upon earth, is 
the moral insight to discern the social consequence 
of individual morals and a corresponding revival of 
personal moral earnestness. He who aspires to 
devote his life to the service of the Kingdom should, 
above all things, perceive clearly that nothing he 

35 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

can say or do can possibly contribute more than the 
integrity and uprightness of his own life. 

In order to a clearer insight into the social con- 
sequences of personal morality, consider the three 
vices : licentiousness, gambling, and drunkenness. 
The immediate effects of the first are diseased 
bodies, broken homes, disgraced parents, outraged 
offspring, ruined lives, and the mental anguish of 
shame and despair. As for the second, think of the 
worthless, wasted lives of young men, and of the 
fathers whose gray hairs have been brought down 
in sorrow to the grave. Intemperance has made us 
so familiar with its harvest of horrors that we are 
calloused to them and contemplate them with an 
almost fatalistic hopelessness and indifference. The 
trail of poverty, suffering, heartbreak, and death 
which this vice has left in its train is almost equiva- 
lent to perpetual war. 

But these vices have not only their direct and 
immediate social consequences, they have their in- 
direct effects as well. For in a complex society like 
ours they have assumed commercialized forms. 
Everywhere they have organized to corrupt the offi- 
cers of the law in order to secure their own protec- 
tion. One of the most shameful chapters in the 
story of our cities' shame is the complicity of law 

36 



The Social Effects of Individual Morals 

officers with the organized interests of vice. Offi- 
cers whose sworn duty it is to protect the people 
from the underworld have often protected the un- 
derworld from the people. Not only so, but by an 
alliance with public-service corporations they and 
the vice interests together have been able abso- 
lutely to control the governments of many of our 
American cities. Thus vice has often rendered mu- 
nicipal democracy a failure, temporarily, at least, 
has prostituted popular government to its own uses, 
and raised the question whether or not democracy 
can succeed in America. Delos F. Wilcox asserts 
that vice is the chief enemy of democracy. 

Imagine, now, a society in which these vices and 
their consequences have been pushed to their logical 
conclusion; a society, in other words, in which they 
are universal. A more veritable hell upon earth can 
not be imagined. On the other hand, conceive a 
society from which these vices have been entirely 
eliminated (and this, by the way, is as conceivable 
as a society in which an equitable distribution of 
wealth has been attained), and you have conceived 
a society that has made tremendous strides toward 
the realization of the Kingdom of God. 

How evident it is, therefore, that the individual 
who contributes to the prevalence of these vices in 

37 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

society is a tearer-down, a destroyer, a veritable 
traitor to the common good! How evident, too, 
that he whose life is immune from these moral dis- 
eases is making a large contribution to the welfare 
of society! How much social service, how much 
of the work of the reformer or philanthropist would 
it require, forsooth, to cancel the damage that nat- 
urally and inevitably accrues from a vicious life? 

Again, in order that the social consequence of 
personal morality may be more clearly discerned, 
let us consider what morality is in itself. 

It is fundamentally a social device. It is the 
indispensable basis of the social order. It is by 
society that moral standards have been set up as 
the result of the race's experience. The things that 
we call right are the things that the race has demon- 
strated to be conservative of the general welfare. 
The essential reason for the moral life of the indi- 
vidual is not primarily to secure his own happiness, 
but to make possible successful social relations. 
Courage, for instance, the virtue of war, has as its 
function the security of the group and the triumph 
of the national cause. The object of business in- 
tegrity is to make business organization and activity 
possible. In countries where business integrity is 

38 



The Social Effects of Individual Morals 

at a low ebb, credit and the complexer forms of 
commercial organization are an impossibility. 
Truthfulness, likewise, is a device by means of which 
we are able to live together. So are all the virtues. 
It is true that society usually rewards the virtuous 
man. But, moreover, because of the social law of 
survival and the spiritual nature of man, the vir- 
tuous man is, in the long run, the happiest man. 
Nevertheless, if the welfare of society requires it, 
the ultimate sacrifice may be required from the in- 
dividual. 

Only a socio-central ethical theory, therefore, 
can stand the test of logic and human history. 

The same truth may be stated conversely and 
concretely by pointing out the fact that one immoral 
person can ruin a family, one rascal can bankrupt 
a firm, a single traitor can lose a battle, a few rogues 
can spoil a community. Likewise a sufficient pro- 
portion of immoral people can debauch a nation and 
undermine a civilization. 

In society the paths of individual interests cross 
and recross, but the individuals must not clash. 
Friction and collisions must be prevented, and slight 
irritations must be soothed. Ambitious, grasping, 
passionate, conniving human nature, bent on getting 



39 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

what it wants without regard to the rights of others, 
must be directed, restrained, or suppressed in the 
interests of the greater number. Those animal in- 
stincts which the struggle for existence among the 
lower orders necessarily augmented are, many of 
them, still necessary to the survival of the human 
species. However, they must be guided, curbed, re- 
strained, controlled. Otherwise human life could 
never rise above brute level. To this end the thou- 
shalts and the thou-shalt-nots of the moral law are 
absolutely requisite. And this is almost their total 
function. 

Individual morality is, therefore, the most fun- 
damental thing in society. It is the mechanical de- 
sign by means of which part fits part and wheel 
mashes into wheel in this great social machine. It 
is the plan that transforms the mob into the Mace- 
donian phalanx, and brings social order out of in- 
dividual chaos. The ancient virtues are, therefore, 
more valuable to us than modern inventions. We 
might better fail to secure our share of the world's 
trade than fail in the application of the moral law. 
It were better to let our children grow up in igno- 
rance than to bring them up in schools where their 
moral fiber is disintegrated. We might better dis- 
pense with the telephone and the telegraph, be de- 

40 



The Social Effects of Individual Morals 

prived of our modern transportation systems, and 
go back to the wheelbarrow and the ox-cart than 
to be deprived of the moral law which has stood 
the test of centuries, for without it society could 
not exist at all. 

Such considerations as these should make it clear 
how much damage can be done by a single cog-wheel 
in the social machine which does not fit its place, by 
a single individual whose life is immoral. He is a 
destroyer and an iconoclast. He disintegrates and 
tears to pieces the social fabric. He is an undesir- 
able citizen. If there were none but such as he, 
civilization would be impossible, and the Kingdom- 
hope could never even have been conceived. But 
the person whose life is straight, whose deeds are 
good, whose morality conserves the social fabric 
and contributes to the moral progress of the world, 
should understand that his service to the coming 
Kingdom, for which he prays, is no mean service. 
Let him in this find inspiration. 

But there is a higher level than the mere absti- 
nence from positive vice. There are higher virtues. 
From the consideration of the infringement of posi- 
tive laws let us proceed, therefore, to those senti- 
ments and feelings upon which the gospel places its 
emphasis as the great moral desiderata of life — 

41 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

sentiments of sympathy, love, and good will. By 
so doing we shall be able to see that the person 
who lives on this high Christian plane makes a posi- 
tive contribution as great as is the negative damage 
wrought by the vicious individual. 

For these sentiments are not merely sentiments, 
they are instincts. They are instincts, morever, 
which lie at the very basis of society. Professor 
Ross points out that the contribution of human na- 
ture itself to the social order consists principally in 
the instincts of sympathy and the sense of justice. 
Without these constituent elements of the psychic 
endowment of man, society could never have begun 
at all; and the moral progress of society is to be 
precisely in proportion as these instincts triumph 
over the anti-social instincts of human nature. The 
more there are of these sentiments the nearer will 
the Kingdom of God be at hand. And precisely this 
is the core of Jesus' social message. He seized upon 
the socializing instincts of man and sought to aug- 
ment them. The real Christian is the person whose 
habituated interests cluster around these instincts. 
He gets his joy of life from them rather than from 
the anti-social and animal interests of life. In a 
world full of real Christians who have developed 

42 



The Social Effects of Individual Morals 

these higher and more social interests, justice will 
thrive, mutual help and kindness will abound, and 
loyalty to the causes of humanity and the cry of 
human need will never go unheard. 

Imagine a world in which there are no hearts 
imbued with the Christian — or shall we say natural? 
— sentiments of sympathy, good will, and love. 
How dark and cold and unlivable, indeed, such a 
world would be ! Byron's picture of darkness might 
well be applicable to such a world. And he who 
permits those sentiments to die out of his soul is 
helping to make the world such a world as that. In 
such a world social justice would never be dreamed 
of, and the reorganization and Christianization of 
the social order would be an unheard-of formula, 
and there could be no Kingdom-hope. 

Fancy, on the other hand, a world in which every 
individual soul is filled with love of man, sympathy, 
kindness, and good will abounding in every heart. 
That would be a world in which the Kingdom of 
God had been attained. The brotherhood of man 
would no longer be a hope, but an actualized re- 
ality, for it would be a world full of brotherly men. 
In a world like that social institutions could not long 
remain unjust. 

43 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

It is not intended by these remarks to cast one 
iota of disparagement upon the social application 
of Christianity. The social temper is a grand new 
passion. It is only intended to domesticate it and 
utilize it. For most of us must live at home; our 
world is a little world; our contacts, for the most 
part, are with individuals and are personal contacts. 
We have no opportunity, most of us, to make ap- 
preciable contributions to public reforms. Never- 
theless we all ought to realize that we can help. 
And the help that we can render is a most valuable 
kind, for the moral fiber of the mass of common 
people is absolutely prerequisite to the realization 
of the reforms that are on the contemporaneous 
docket. The sculptor can not mold or polish slacked 
lime. It is only the hardest marble that will take 
and hold the forms of beauty that his artist soul 
conceives, and receive the polish that will reflect the 
glorious light of the sun. 

Let us, therefore, reconsecrate our lives to God 
and the service of the Kingdom. Let us begin every 
new day with the devout prayer that that day may 
be a day of upright devotion to the duties and re- 
sponsibilities of our task and station. And let us 
pray, moreover, that the God who was the God of 

44 



The Social Effects of Individual Morals 

social evolution through the centuries of the past, 
and who from time to time has sent an Amos or 
an Isaiah, a Savonarola or an Erasmus, a Wesley 
or a Booth, may send to America, during this gen- 
eration, a prophet whose message shall reach the 
ears of all our people and inspire them to lives of 
firm and stable morality. 



45 



Ill 

Social Christianity Begins at Home 



Social Christianity Begins at Home 

THE Kingdom of God begins at home. The 
most important service that any Christian can 
render to the Kingdom of God upon earth is to 
make his own home an ideal principality of that 
Kingdom. For here is a social institution, the 
family, which needs no reconstruction. Its organi- 
zation is already on perfect lines. The monoga- 
mous family is the perfect family type. What it 
needs to make it a social success is the right kind 
of folks to constitute it. So far as the family is 
concerned, therefore, the social application of the 
gospel depends upon the moral regeneration of in- 
dividuals; and there is no social aspect of Chris- 
tianity that begins to compare in importance with 
this. Moreover, here is an immediate, right-at-hand 
opportunity for each of us to make a social contri- 
bution. 

In order to make clear the Christian's social duty 
with respect to this institution, it may be well to 
consider how basic a social institution it is. 

The Bible records in its earliest chapters the 
4 49 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

Hebrew conception of the origin of the family, and 
St. Paul emphasizes the fundamental character of 
the institution. As for Jesus, there is no specific sub- 
ject on which he speaks more explicitly than on the 
inviolability of the monogamous family relation. 
Professor Peabbdy has pointed out that his in- 
sistence was even more stringent than we are wont 
to interpret it. His presence at the wedding in 
Cana of Galilee is an incidental testimony as to his 
conception of marriage which we all refer to with 
pleasure, even though its significance may not be 
great. As has been pointed out in another place, 
this institution is the only one for whose plan of 
organizatibn the Great Teacher took pains to pre- 
scribe. 

History also gives abundant testimony to the sa- 
credness of this institution, for it shows us that, 
although other forms of the family have existed at 
various times and places, no other form has been 
able %3 conserve as high a type of civilization as the 
monogamous form, and in fact the struggle for ex- 
istence has all but eliminated these other forms. 
Moreover, history has furnished repeated instances 
of the fact that when the pure family-life has been 
seriously broken down, civilization has broken down 
with it. The case of Rome is a no less serious warn- 

5° 



Social Christianity Begins at Home 

ing in this respect because reference to it has be- 
come so trite. 

Turning from history, we find science furnished 
with abundant evidence that promiscuity causes ste- 
rility, not only by reason of the diseases that it gives 
rise to, but for other reasons perhaps not fully un- 
derstood. This fact makes it evident to those who 
have looked closely into the matter that promiscuity 
must lead ultimately to the elimination of the race 
that practices it. As to the diseases just referred 
to, it is doubtful whether there is any force at work 
among the American people that menaces more 
seriously their perpetuity. The very antiquity of 
the monogamous family, moreover, is one of the 
strongest evidences of its validity. Westermarck 
and others, who have made extensive investigations 
among primitive peoples, assert that the permanent 
union of one man with one woman is an almost uni- 
versal rule except where the morals of the native 
peoples have been corrupted by foreigners. Some 
have even gone so far as to assert with consider- 
able show of data that a stable monogamous family 
very frequently obtains among anthropoid apes. If 
this be true it would go to show that this type of 
union is older than the human race itself, bred in 
our very bone, as it were, so that nature may not 

51 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

tolerate its violation without serious biological re- 
taliation. 

These facts give us a point of view for a clear 
appreciation of the far-reaching social destructive- 
ness of sexual vices and divorce. Together they 
mean the perpetuation of the diseases they engender, 
with their consequent poverty and crime. Their 
prevalence among us would be an incontrovertible 
sign of decay if permitted to continue and thrive. 
They would mean the inevitable collapse of our 
civilization and the extinction of our race. The se- 
riousness of this menace as it exists in America to- 
day has frequently been pointed out, and it can not 
be overestimated. 

The causes are doubtless many and varied. No 
doubt it is true that economic pressure, and the so- 
cial maladjustments resulting, often do give rise 
both to vice and to divorce. But the frequent pro- 
test that we have recently heard from the pens of 
young women of the class from which the victims 
of commercialized vice are said to be most fre- 
quently recruited indicate very clearly that these 
causes do not undermine the virtue of those who 
are possessed of a staunch philosophy of life. Pro- 
fessor Peabody remarks very succinctly that not a 
hard life but a soft creed is the cause of divorce, 

5* 



Social Christianity Begins at Home 

and no doubt there is a large measure of truth in 
his remark. Human nature being as it is, we may 
never, of course, ignore the economic and social 
forces as causes of vice and divorce. Still it may 
always be validly contended that low ideals and 
flabby moral fiber must always be reckoned with. 

As a matter of fact, the dry rot that is eating 
at the very vitals of our family-life in America is 
exaggerated individualism. This is a philosophy 
of life consciously or subconsciously held which be- 
lieves that the vital end and highest good of life is 
pleasure. All laws are appraised with respect to 
their capacity of contributing thereto. The respon- 
sibilities which the individual owes to society and its 
members are largely ignored, and duty is a small 
word in the vocabulary of such persons. This phi- 
losophy inevitably undermines all social institutions 
which depend upon the sense of duty and responsi- 
bility. This spirit seems to have been growing, 
especially among our middle and wealthier classes, 
since the days of our grandfathers. And the ma- 
terialism of the ages has by no means diminished it. 
And it is this spirit which, more than any other 
assignable cause, has made such inroads upon the 
stability of the American family. 

No further comment is necessary, therefore, to 

S3 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

make clear the destructive social effects of the lives 
of these men and women whose conduct tends to 
the spread of vice and the increase of divorce. 
Whoever entertains toward his own housemate and 
family responsibilities those hedonistic thoughts and 
feelings which, if carried to their logical outcome, 
would lead him to repudiate the most intimate social 
obligations any human being can possibly assume, 
may well tremble, for he is on the verge of a preci- 
pice. Let him beware lest he be numbered among 
the destroyers of the social fabric. Such as he post- 
pone indefinitely the coming of the Kingdom of God. 

Not only these considerations, however, but the 
positive contributions that can be made to the social 
welfare by the maintenance of ideal family relations 
may well be considered. For they also make it clear 
that the Kingdom of God begins at home. 

The best things in life have arisen out of family 
ties, and can only be conserved by perpetuation of 
those ties. All are now familiar with what John 
Fiske discovered in the lengthened period of human 
infancy. It was he who made clear to us for the 
first time how all the higher values of life have 
arisen out of the relations made necessary by the 
helplessness of infants and children. Love, altru- 
ism, self-sacrifice, and perhaps even religious faith, 

54 



Social Christianity Begins at Home 

could never have arisen except out of the relations 
of parent to child and of brother to brother. The 
dearest words in all languages are the words of the 
hearthstone. Consider the incomparable values and 
joys of life connoted by such words as mother, 
father, sweetheart, babe, sister, brother, son, and 
daughter. We may legitimately state as one of the 
normal ends of a family, its function as a producer 
of the highest good of human life. 

Another and, for our present purpose, a more 
important social function of the family is its function 
as a training school of the social virtues. It was 
the original social unit where such training was first 
given, and no other institution can entirely super- 
sede it. Here children are habituated in obedience 
and respect for authority, habits absolutely essential 
to the success of government and the stability of so- 
ciety. Here brothers and sisters learn self-restraint, 
sympathy, mutual help, and the respect for the rights 
of others, traits of character absolutely fundamental 
to society. Here adults learn the full meaning of 
love and the self-abnegation it motivates. Here 
they realize, too, the joys and satisfactions of the 
most exacting responsibilities. The terms brother- 
hood and fatherhood have been seized upon to sym- 
bolize the highest religious ideals that the world has 

SS 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

ever conceived, and these symbols would be utterly 
empty of meaning were it not for the meaning con- 
tributed by the family relation. Thus the individual 
is socialized in the home as he can be socialized no- 
where else, and that socialization is drilled so early 
and so deeply into the habits of the individual and 
woven so intricately into the highest ideals of his life 
that he can never escape them. Thus the family 
transmits from age to age the moral heritage, and 
moral progress is possible only as the family fur- 
nishes us with the higher types of altruism and 
nobler specimens of social devotion. 

It is only as society is liberally furnished with 
individuals who have acquired these higher virtues 
that the better phases of our civilization are made 
possible. Moreover, as has been said, the stability 
of democratic government is absolutely dependent 
upon the habit of obedience and respect for author- 
ity. It is clear, therefore, that to spare the rod is 
not only to spoil the child, but also to spoil the re- 
public, for it furnishes us with a generation of men 
and women who have never learned respect and obe- 
dience for law. It might not be amiss to apply Pro- 
fessor Hall's term "degenerate pedagogy" to the 
modern home as well as to the modern school. For 
we seem to be obsessed with the idea in these days 

56 



Social Christianity Begins at Home 

that the individuality and freedom of young America 
must above all things be conserved. As a matter of 
fact, rigorous drill in habits of obedience, which is 
necessary to the proper moral regimen of childhood, 
can seldom be enforced without sterner persuasives 
than are sanctioned by the domestic pedagogy now 
in vogue. The national custom of indulging the 
willfulness of children and cultivating in them an 
exaggerated notion of personal liberty has far-reach- 
ing social and political consequences of which the 
average parent is by no means aware. 

Similar remarks might cogently be made about 
the habits of mutual help. We are suffering in 
America from a lack of public spirit. Democracy 
is like life-insurance : no more can be gotten out of 
it in the long run than is put into it. And if we are 
to have public-spirited citizens, the basis of that trait 
of character must be developed by the relations 
children are taught to maintain toward one another 
and toward their neighbors and local institutions. 

Since these things are so, consider the social in- 
fluence of an ideal home. In such a home are in 
vogue the Pauline ideal relations of husband to wife 
and wife to husband, of parents to children and chil- 
dren to parents, of masters to servants and servants 
to masters. Love reigns in such a home, and it is 

57 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

a veritable heaven upon earth. In a home presided 
over by the right kind of a husband and father, kind- 
ness banishes most of the causes of friction that fur- 
nish the grist for the divorce-mill. We are told that 
the increase of divorce is partly due to the com- 
mendable demand on the part of womankind for 
the enjoyment of her just rights. She is rightly pro- 
testing against oppression that so often prevailed 
under the old regime, where the lord and master 
of the house was tyrant as well. This, no doubt, 
is in large measure true, and perhaps there is a sense 
in which the increased divorce is a necessary evil 
attendant upon the social advance of abolishing this 
ancient tyranny; but kindness on the part of the 
husband and father vacates this entire contention. 
Kindness, therefore, is a most efficient antiseptic of 
social disease. 

Again, how far-reaching and beneficent is the 
social influence of the good housewife and mother. 
Many a saintly matron is prone to lament that she 
has never had the opportunity to do much good in 
the world. She should be led to understand the 
social significance of her life-work. She has con- 
tributed more than a host of social workers. And, 
moreover, the foolish, undomestic woman who sees 
only the limitations, handicaps, and restraints of her 

58 



Social Christianity Begins at Home 

home, should also be led to see the opportunity for 
social service that she is missing. How empty is 
the shallow round of social functions, how fruitless 
the energy devoted to the current fashions, how 
transient the joys of freedom from responsibility, 
as compared with the usefulness, the benefit, and 
the satisfaction of training boys and girls into phys- 
ical, moral, and spiritual fitness for their places in 
the social order. Occasionally some woman who is 
endowed with unusual genius may make a larger 
contribution to the world's welfare as a reformer 
and philanthropist than she could do in any other 
way; but to the normal woman no other task offers 
a sphere of activity or opportunity which begins 
to compare in social usefulness with the domestic 
sphere. If God has in store a brighter crown 
for one than for another of His children, it cer- 
tainly is reserved for her who has performed effi- 
ciently and well the duties of that sphere. And cer- 
tainly, if love returning in old age to the giver of 
love is the best of earth's rewards, she will find her- 
self rich in reward for the service she has rendered 
to humanity. 

The social application of Christianity indeed be- 
gins at home. For the high purpose in hand it is 
far more requisite that America should be full of 

59 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

ideal homes than that we should secure an equitable 
distribution of wealth. To be sure, many families 
are depressed by poverty and hard life below the 
economic level where an ideal home is possible, and 
the necessity of securing for such families a sufficient 
economic basis can by no means be gainsaid or dis- 
counted. Nevertheless there are all too many homes 
where the economic causes are by no means the real 
causes that interfere with their fulfillment of proper 
moral and spiritual functions. Let us, therefore, 
place alongside of our desire for larger social justice 
an equal desire for a higher domestic life ; for upon 
this, as perhaps upon no other one thing, depends 
our future as a nation. And imagine, moreover, 
what kind of a world this would be if all the homes 
that might be ideal were really so. 

Such a hope as this is, however, somewhat in- 
consistent on the part of a man or a woman who 
has not made his own home, so far as in him lies, 
ideal. The political unit, so to speak, of the King- 
dom of God in which each of us registers his vote 
is his own home. The most consistent and the most 
effective social service, therefore, that any of us can 
perform is to render his own home a little model 
of heaven upon earth. 

But this can not be done unless the Kingdom is, 

60 



Social Christianity Begins at Home 

in the words of the child referred to elsewhere, 
down in our own hearts. This is the essential prin- 
ciple. Ideal institutions, ideal society, depend upon 
the ideal family, and the ideal family depends upon 
ideal persons. If we feel, therefore, as doubtless 
most of us do, that we can not remake ourselves, 
we shall do well to pray that some transfiguring 
power higher than ourselves shall give us a new 
heart. Such personal salvation will prove to be 
social salvation as well. 

Let us here register two pleas in behalf of the 
home as a social institution. The first of these pleas 
is for the restoration to the American home of the 
old-fashioned family altar of our fathers and grand- 
fathers. What an influence it exerted upon the lives 
of those of us who can remember it as a part of our 
childhood ! Its value is greater than either our own 
generation or our fathers' was aware. Read again 
the "Cotter's Saturday Night." Listen reverently 
while Robert Burns portrays the scenes of worship 
in the humble Scottish home, and ponder well what 
he says: 

"From scenes like these old Scotia's glories rise." 

The second plea is for homeless children, espe- 
cially those of our great cities. From them, if they 

61 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

are neglected, must inevitably be recruited our worst 
class of criminals. Nor will institutional life ade- 
quately solve the problem in their behalf. Nature 
has decreed that they shall be reared in homes. 
Science declares that even red-headed, unprepossess- 
ing boys, and homely, unkempt little girls, granted 
they are not positively neurotic with respect to birth, 
will turn out as well on the average as the offspring 
of our own homes, if only they are given the advan- 
tage of a favorable environment. There are hun- 
dreds of childless wives who might rear one or more 
such children. To be sure, it would cost them the 
disturbance of an occasional night's rest, the occa- 
sional forfeiture of the annual trip to the seaside 
or the mountains, and the cancellation of some at- 
tractive social engagements; but it would also have 
its rewards. It would mean the encircling arms 
and clinging fingers of a little child uttering precious 
words those wives otherwise may never hear. It 
would mean a purpose in life that would lift the life 
to a level of incomparably greater worth. It would 
mean the solace and comfort in later years of manly 
sons and affectionate daughters. It would mean, 
moreover, a service to the Kingdom of God with 
which scarcely anything else which they will have 
the opportunity to do can compare. 

62 



IV 

The Social Harvest of Materialism 



The Social Harvest of Materialism 

IT is proverbially remarked that philosophy bakes 
no bread. But Professor James, in the first chap- 
ters of his "Pragmatism," insists that it is the most 
important characteristic of an individual or a nation. 
This is because philosophy is something more than 
mere intellectual speculation. It is, as Rudolph 
Eucken urges, a serious and often passionate attempt 
to solve the problem of human life. A man's phi- 
losophy is his answer to the question of what con- 
stitutes for him the ideal meaning of life. What 
are the ends really worth pursuing, the interests that 
constitute his life really worth the living. 

Because philosophy in this sense is so serious a 
concern, some of the great historic systems of philo- 
sophical thought have exerted incalculable influence 
upon the course of human events. Plato's system 
is an illustration, especially in its bearing upon the 
monastic conception of life prevalent during the 
Middle Ages. As a matter of fact the distinction 
with which we are all familiar between the sacred 
and secular is a far-off echo of this ancient philo- 
5 65 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

sophical system. In the sense in which the term is 
here used, the teaching of Jesus may be considered 
a philosophy, for they prescribe a way of life, and 
it is superfluous to comment here upon their in- 
fluence. 

Each individual human being has his philosophy 
of life. Perhaps he holds it consciously, perhaps 
only subconsciously. But in either case it determines 
the ends for which he strives, and motivates in the 
last analysis his entire activity. 

Modern nations all differ from one another with 
respect to the philosophy of life that prevails among 
them, and each age in the world's history is charac- 
terized by a dominating philosophy peculiar to it- 
self. This fact we often overlook in our study of 
history, and by interpreting some epoch of the past 
in terms of the philosophy of human life that now 
prevails among us we utterly misconstrue the his- 
toric epoch to which our attention is directed. It 
is only by putting ourselves into sympathetic appre- 
ciation of the prevailing philosophy of any age that 
we can adequately understand it. Thus the ancient 
Assyrian Empire and civilization must be inter- 
preted in terms of the militarism that seems to have 
dominated its activities. The Greek peoples during 
the centuries immediately following the Periclean 

66 



The Social Harvest of Materialism 

age were actuated by an excessively individualistic 
conception of life, and this dominated the very 
course of their history. Monastic asceticism and 
chivalric militarism contended for supremacy during 
the mediaeval epoch. The spirit of the Enlighten- 
ment and of the century that saw the rise of de- 
mocracy was again individualistic. Thus the pendu- 
lum swings from one extreme to another. 

The philosophy of human life that dominates 
our own age, permeates its atmosphere, and ob- 
sesses the thought of nearly all of our people, is 
materialistic. We are convinced that a man's life 
consists in the abundance of the things which he 
possesseth. We worship success, and spell the name 
of our god with dollar signs instead of s's. In 
terms of success we realize that we ourselves are 
appraised by our boyhood friends and the members 
of our own family, and in the same terms we are 
preparing ourselves to appraise our own children. 
Hence the evidences of material success and power 
are sought after with an energy sometimes almost 
terrific. We desire these possessions not merely as 
means of personal gratification, but because they are 
the current standards by which the worth and 
achievement of personalities are measured and com- 
pared. 

67 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

By this standard do we not only estimate our- 
selves and one another, but also the achievements 
of the age itself. It is to our material progress 
and development that we point with pride — our 
transportation system, our splendid commercial and 
industrial cities, our multiplied agencies of produc- 
tion, our new and incomparably efficient forms of 
business organization. These are characteristic of 
the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution, 
we believe, divides the world's history into two great 
epochs, and we are quite confident that more has 
been achieved since than before. Thus do we ap- 
praise the age in terms of mammon. The mani- 
festations of this philosophy are everywhere in evi- 
dence. The excessive business activity of the age 
and the luxuries that are displayed everywhere are 
perhaps its most concrete examples. But deeper 
than this are certain habits of thought and action 
common among us. Thus, not generals and poets 
and statesmen and philosophers and prophets catch 
most effectively the imagination of the American 
people and become the heroes of youthful ambition, 
but captains of industry. Our rivalries and emula- 
tion further betray our materialistic view of life. 
A large proportion of our people are living habitu- 
ally beyond their means in the frantic endeavor to 

68 



The Social Harvest of Materialism 

keep up appearances so as to maintain a social stand- 
ing equivalent to that of their associates, or so as to 
secure admittance to the social circle of their su- 
periors. Our very reforms are materialistic at the 
basis. Perhaps this is rightly so, for an epoch of 
industrial democracy must not too tardily follow 
upon the heels of political democracy. Nevertheless 
the labor problem, socialism, and other kindred 
movements clearly reveal the fact that even our 
reforms are materialistic. Sometimes this material- 
ism is definitely and explicitly set forth, as in the 
Marxian theory of history. More often it is im- 
plicitly held, as by the millions of our common 
people, who entertain an almost childlike faith that 
a more equitable distribution of wealth will prove 
a panacea for all the ills of life. 

Nor is this conception of life confined to the rich. 
It is even more influential among our middle classes, 
for there the struggle to secure the material goods 
of life is more strenuous and the tragedies of failure 
more numerous and distressing. Not he alone who 
has, and whose only joy of life consists in enjoying 
what he has, is a materialist; but equally he who 
has not, but struggles to have, and who believes that 
he has missed the joy of life because he does not 
secure. This spirit permeates also the laboring 

6 9 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

classes, for they also estimate their lives bitterly in 
terms merely of the things which they do not possess. 
Since epochs differ with respect to their domi- 
nating philosophy, we must conclude that in each 
case peculiar causes must have been at work. The 
reasons for the current vogue of the materialistic 
philosophy of life are not difficult to discover. They 
are to be sought in the industrial history of the cen- 
tury and a half just past. The accumulation of 
capital in England during the eighteenth century, 
and the excessive demand for the products of Eng- 
lish industries over the supply, gave rise to a deeply- 
felt want for more rapid means of production. The 
inventions which followed as a result of this ne- 
cessity are too well known to need enumerating here. 
Chief among them was the steam engine. These 
inventions revolutionized industry, and by the middle 
of the nineteenth century the factory system had dis- 
placed former methods of production almost every- 
where in western Europe and America. Steam 
transportation and electric communication followed 
almost immediately. These industrial changes cre- 
ated the necessity for larger aggregations of capital, 
and the corporate organization of industry was the 
inevitable result. At the same time these changes 
were occurring the vast resources of North America, 

70 



The Social Harvest of Materialism 

not to mention those of other continents, invited ex- 
ploitation. These modern industrial changes and 
these vast new resources opened up unprecedented 
opportunities for wealth-getting. This being the 
case, men naturally devoted their attention to build- 
ing factories and railroads, promoting corporations, 
opening up new areas, and exploiting new resources. 
Occupied thus with these activities, it could hardly 
be otherwise than that man should become preoccu- 
pied with them, and the inevitable commercial esti- 
mate of life took possession of a commercial age. 

The consequences, particularly the social con- 
sequences — for these are our special concern here — 
have been far-reaching, and often far, indeed, from 
beneficial. This spirit of the age has made inroads 
upon our family-life. Fathers have become too 
busy to properly companion and train their boys. 
Mothers have been drawn into the social whirl with 
moral consequences to their children too prevalent 
and plainly seen to need mention. The strain to 
maintain the standard of living demanded by ma- 
terialistic ideals has not infrequently been too great 
for the family ties to endure. Many a divorce has 
resulted. 

The Church, also, has everywhere felt the in- 
fluence of this tendency. Men have grown too busy 

71 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

to attend its services. More than that, they have 
grown so practical (the word has come to connote 
the spirit of the age) that they have no use for the 
spiritual good of the religious life, and therefore 
nothing to go to church for. Classes of our popu- 
lation have been alienated from the Church because 
the Church has refused or neglected (perhaps un- 
justifiably) to espouse their cause of industrial re- 
form. Consequently the problem of the alienation 
of the masses of the Church has become more or 
less acute. But perhaps the most ominous influence 
of materialism upon the religious life of our people 
is in its influence upon the clergy. Even they have 
come to estimate themselves and one another in 
terms of the salaries they receive. As a result their 
struggle for place and preferment is worldly enough, 
and often unscrupulous. How can the world be 
expected to hear and heed the gospel message from 
the lips of priests who are themselves offering sacri- 
fice upon the altars of Mammon? 

Our political life has also felt the pressure of 
materialistic ideals. If life's highest values are esti- 
mated in terms of salaries and other emoluments 
only, how can we expect that the emoluments will 
always be questioned rigorously as to their sources? 
If men enter public life for the money there is in it, 

72 



The Social Harvest of Materialism 

and scarcely ever for other reasons, naturally they 
will seek to get all the money out of it they can. 
And the temptation to accept dishonest money will 
not be so vigorously scorned as in an age and among 
a people where honor and fidelity to public trust are 
placed among the highest values of life. Further, 
as long as business offers so many opportunities to 
secure what is considered the highest good, men who 
are successful in business will be loath to turn to 
the field of politics. Not only that, but they will be 
able to spare but little time from their pursuit of 
private wealth to devote to the interests of the gen- 
eral welfare. Inattention to public interests will 
naturally become quite general. From among a 
people who are almost universally too busy making 
money to give attention to political interests, and 
who, moreover, conceive a government's chief func- 
tion to be the maintenance of business prosperity, 
how is it to be expected that there will arise in suffi- 
cient numbers high-minded, public-spirited men as 
candidates for political service? Moreover, since 
business conceives it to be the function of government 
to conserve the interests of business, how is it to be 
expected that money motives will not be brought to 
bear upon the public servants who are in the public 
service for money ends ? A materialistic nation must 

73 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

inevitably expect its government to be honeycombed 
with graft. And if that government is a young de- 
mocracy, its success and ultimate survival will inevi- 
tably be jeopardized. Truly has it been said by one 
of the closest students of popular government in 
America, that we are sick unto death with the money- 
mania. 

Perhaps it may be proper to hint at still other 
consequences of the materialistic spirit of our age, 
which, though less evident and immediate, may pos- 
sibly be of even greater significance. It is a question 
how long a people can endure the stress of such a 
strenuous life as our American life has been for the 
past generation or two, especially when that strain 
is not merely physical, but nervous. Nor is the nerv- 
ous strain the strain of mental work alone, but the 
strain and worry of the rivalries, ambitions, and emu- 
lations previously referred to. The fret, anxiety, 
and disappointment draw heavily on our vitality. 
The wear and tear, moreover, is not any the less 
when the struggle is, as many of us have realized, 
for ends that are not worth the struggle. Who can 
be sure that this is not among the causes of the rest- 
less nervousness which foreigners observe among 
our people, and which we ourselves may discern evi- 
dences of in the immense demand for popular amuse- 

74 



The Social Harvest of Materialism 

ments? Who can be certain that there is no causal 
connection between these things and the alarming 
prevalence of crime, insanity, and neurosis? Is it 
not conceivable that the race which has brought 
about the marvelous industrial development of mod- 
ern times shall fail to survive to enjoy its benefits 
simply because the strain has incapacitated it for 
reproducing its native population with sufficient ra- 
pidity to hold its own against the superior fecundity 
of alien peoples who have been attracted to our 
shores by that very industrial progress which we 
have produced? And it is impossible but that our 
protracted service of a god who can not satisfy the 
depths of the human soul shall leave us in the end 
oppressed by the devitalizing world-weariness and 
pessimism always characteristic of a decadent 
epoch. 

To the Christian inspired with the Kingdom- 
hope all this is discouraging indeed, for he knows 
that a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of 
the things that he possesseth. He knows, moreover, 
that an age can not serve both God and Mammon, 
and that the Kingdom of Heaven can never come in 
an age devoted to the service of pelf. The social 
consequences of materialism are to him distressing 
indeed, and he prays daily that this philosophy of 

75 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

life may rapidly give place to conceptions more 
Christian. He realizes, moreover, that whatever 
means contribute to the displacement of this phi- 
losophy of life will hasten the coming of the King- 
dom. And he feels that if he can contribute any- 
thing toward this result, he will be performing a val- 
uable social service. 

The social service that can be rendered by a 
single individual who, without conscious effort, is 
blissfully indifferent to the material estimate of life 
may perhaps effectively be illustrated by an incident. 
There was once a man of this stamp who taught 
biology in the high school of a small city in the 
Middle West. He lived a simple life, was main- 
taining a happy home, and rearing well a family of 
considerable size on a small income. He was ab- 
solutely without restless effort to be contented with 
small means. Instead he thoroughly enjoyed his 
life, his home, his profession, and his religion. 
Years afterwards — a long period of Protestant mis- 
sionary service in the Orient having intervened — 
this man met a young Jewish rabbi who had been 
one of his pupils at the time he was a high-school 
teacher. He was quite surprised to discover that 
the young man had become a rabbi, for he had in 
the former days looked upon him as the heir and 

7 6 



The Social Harvest of Materialism 

promising successor of a leading local merchant. 
When asked by his former teacher as to his reasons 
for the choice of a life-work, the teacher was com- 
pletely dumbfounded when the young Jew replied 
that it was the teacher himself whose influence had, 
more than anything else, determined his choice. 
Pressed for an explanation, the young rabbi replied 
that the teacher's manner of life had set him to 
thinking that there was something higher and better 
than merely to make money. 

Ideals are contagious. They are not transmitted 
from soul to soul by argument on the part of those 
who only half believe them. They are transmitted 
by suggestion from the example of those who believe 
them so completely, so habitually, and so subcon- 
sciously that they put forth no effort to resist com- 
peting ideals held by those about them. All that is 
necessary to liquidate the excessive materialism of 
our age is simply for enough of us to believe thus 
really and genuinely the Christian ideals instead of 
the materialistic. Whoever serves God instead of 
Mammon in the depths of his heart contributes his 
service to that end as surely as did the teacher re- 
ferred to above; and just as this man's influence 
must have radiated about him in an ever-widening 
circle, so must the influence of every other such per- 

77 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

son. This ideal once started in vogue, its vogue in- 
creases by geometric ratio. 

Those Christians, then, who are ambitious to 
render social service in the interests of the coming 
Kingdom of God in the world may well look to 
their own hearts to discover there whether the in- 
fluence of their ideals is making for or against the 
materialistic spirit of the age. And if they discover 
there a restlessness, an effort of resistance to that 
spirit, they may well seek a change of heart in the 
ways it has so often been sought. For here again 
it is true that by grace we are saved through faith, 
and that not of ourselves : it is the gift of God. And 
he whose personal salvation makes him a servant 
from the heart of God instead of Mammon may be 
sure that he will make his proportionate contribu- 
tion to the overthrow of the kingdom of Mammon 
and the establishment of his own Father's Kingdom 
in the earth. 



78 



V 

The Social Fruits of the Spiritual Life 



The Social Fruits of the Spiritual Life 

THE message of Rauschenbusch and the other 
prophets of social Christianity have already 
been referred to. That message has indeed moved 
profoundly the religious world. But just now we are 
turning to another religious message that bids fair 
to move us at least as profoundly. That is the mes- 
sage of Rudolph Eucken, of Jena. 

His plea is for the spiritual life. He contends 
that its demands are irrepressible and perennial. 
The whole history of philosophy he interprets as the 
expression of the spiritual nature of man seeking to 
solve the problem of human life. He insists, more- 
over, that any age which repudiates the needs of the 
soul must inevitably be followed by an age which 
swings back through spiritual unrest to the spiritual 
life. On the first page of his little booklet entitled 
"Back to Religion" he declares that it is a super- 
ficial observer of the signs of our times who believes 
that this age is characterized only by blatant denial, 
for, he continues, however much the denial of re- 
ligion may yet obtain among the masses, there is 
6 81 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

evident a demand arising out of the intellect and out 
of the depths of men's souls for a return to the 
spiritual life, an undeniable yearning for more depth 
of life. 

What, now, does Eucken mean by this charac- 
teristic phrase of his, "The depths of men's souls?" 

He means, I think, those parts of our natures 
which activity, pleasure, power, and learning fail 
to satisfy; those instinctive needs and desires which 
have led men in all ages to construct philosophies 
and theologies, liturgies and creeds, hymns and 
prayers, and live by them. Those capacities of our 
minds which are exercised and satisfied by the con- 
sciousness of duty well done, sorrows submissively 
and sweetly borne, the misery of existence reverently 
contemplated: this is the depths of our souls. In 
the depths of our souls we feel remorse for sin, the 
joy of forgiveness, and the enthusiasm of consecra- 
tion. In the depths of our souls are emotions of 
repentance, mystical joys of faith, and immortal 
hopes. In the depths of our souls do we contem- 
plate nature's vastness and power, her beauty and 
order, and her fierce relentlessness. The depths of 
our souls respond to the facts of suffering, sorrow, 
and death. It is in the depths of our souls that we 
experience that war in our members of which the 

82 



The Social Fruits of the Spiritual Life 

apostle writes, the depressing sense of guilt, and the 
exultation of moral victory. Our imaginations, re- 
acting against the imperfections and incompleteness 
of our own life and surroundings construct, in the 
depths of our souls, ideals of a perfect life and a 
perfect world. 

In the depths of our souls, says Professor 
Eucken, there is unmistakable demand for more 
depth of life. What does he mean again, by this 
phrase, "More depth of life?" Not more business 
activity; not more of the excitements of pleasure, 
touring, and travel; not more power of material 
success, nor conquests of the scientific intellect: but 
something deeper than these. He means more 
peace of mind and repose of soul; more singleness 
of worthy purpose, less clash and conflict of inner 
desires; more mastery of self and loyalty to others; 
more comfort of faith; more joy of prayer; more 
delight of loving and being loved; more strength of 
soul to resist temptations and bear unbearable 
griefs; more insight into the secrets of union with 
God; more noble enthusiasm for holy ideals. He 
means more satisfaction of these passionate longings 
we so often feel for a holier life; the sparks of that 
triumphant inner fire that from time to time is kin- 
dled in men's souls by renunciation of love, or even 

83 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

life, in behalf of holy causes; more of that insight 
of soul which gives us visions of the invisible world 
where broken arcs are completed in the perfect 
round. This is more depth of life. 

It is with such phrases as these that Eucken re- 
fers to the spiritual life. And to this he says we must 
inevitably return if we are to save our lives from 
emptiness and our age from barrenness. To this, 
moreover, he sees signs that we are already return- 
ing; for the souls of men are never satisfied for long 
with the mere husks of life. 

It must be conceded that the epoch through 
which we have just passed has been skeptical indeed 
of the joys and powers of the spiritual life. It has 
been a commercial age, valuing life in terms of 
abundant possessions. Men were not bankrupted 
by the loss of their souls. It has been an individu- 
alistic, selfish period. Freedom, power, happiness, 
self-assertion, were the great desiderata. Men felt 
little need for prayer and the forgiveness of sins. 
It has been a rationalistic age. The Zeitgeist had 
little faith that piety could lay hold on invisible 
sources of personal power. It was classed with the 
vagaries of the shallow-brained. The soul fared ill 
in such a "practical" age. Psychology tended to ex- 
plain prayer as a psychic phenomenon, the activity 

8 4 



The Social Fruits of the Spiritual Life 

of the self within the self, a pure subjectivity, a mere 
tugging at one's boot-straps. Physical science regis- 
tered the existence of no invisible world; no chem- 
istry tabulated its elements, no astronomy charted 
its location. Naturalistic philosophy was willing, to 
be sure, to effect a division of labor with poetry, 
but insisted that its ideals, though pretty, could not 
be proven. And all the time business, without se- 
rious interruptions or interferences, went on supply- 
ing the market with everything the heart could de- 
sire to eat and to drink and to be merry with. Never 
did man seem so prosperous and so well satisfied 
with himself! 

But of all the wonders of creation the most awe- 
inspiring is the soul of man; and most marvelous 
of all the soul's wonders is the range and scope of 
its activities and needs. The vast designs of busi- 
ness and war, the astonishing creations of philosophy 
and art, the delicacy and the power of poetry and 
music, the heights and depths of love, the whole 
cycle of the passions, the sublime capacity for self- 
abnegation, the curiosity to know and the will to 
live and do — no Goethe or Shakespeare can compass 
all that is in the soul of man. 

Our inventories of life's values are apt, there- 
fore, to fall short of completeness, and our reasons 

85 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

for valuing life are prone to a lack of finality. For 
the whole contents of man defies enumeration by 
a single part of man, and life is ever bigger than 
logic. For instance, our catalogue of the reasons for 
duty is often strikingly deficient. A hopeful doctor 
of philosophy scarcely out of adolescence once as- 
serted sapiently that the only reason for conjugal 
constancy was that one might know his own off- 
spring. As a matter of fact, virtue has, as Wester- 
marck has shown, biological roots older and deeper 
than human existence ; and Fiske has shown us that 
the family relation bears as its fruitage the holiest 
and best things of human life. In the light of these 
facts the flippant young professor's philosophy seems 
partial indeed. 

Such mistakes, however, we are very prone to 
make. Thus ideals that can never be verified are 
often valid symbols of unseen realities. The ideal 
of a rescued sepulcher or of a westward route to 
the East Indies could not, indeed, have borne in- 
spection, but they validly symbolized all that after- 
ward grew out of activity in their behalf, namely, 
the revival of learning in one case, and the whole 
civilization of the western hemisphere in the other. 
The Christian ideals of heaven, of the Kingdom of 
God, of sanctification, have never been surveyed and 

86 



The Social Fruits of the Spiritual Life 

charted; but they do stand, nevertheless, as valid 
symbols of we know not what. Let them continue 
to motivate endeavor and bring forth their benefi- 
cent consequences, as they have done in ages past; 
for there is more reality in visions and ideals than 
is dreamed of in the skeptical philosophy of the day, 
and the epoch that omits religion from its inventory 
of values is presently avenged in the shallowness or 
even decadence of its own life. 

Yes, Horatio, there are more things in heaven 
and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy. 

There are more invisible powers available for 
our inner life than are reckoned by the rash skepti- 
cism of the age. For are we not segments of a 
greater circle? u Me poinitet," the Latin had it. 
Other verbs also called for a like unpersonal idiom, 
as if the soul, swept by certain emotions and pas- 
sions, recognized itself passive rather , than active; 
handled, as it were, a mere individual atom, by 
forces cosmic and universal. There are indeed 
forces at work within us that are not of us. What 
shall we say, for instance, of our instincts ? Are they 
not manifestations of laws and powers that do not 
depend for their existence upon our having been born 
to manifest them? How, further, can the percep- 
tion of outer things occur within us, to interpret to 

87 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

us the things that are without, unless there be some 
connection which we ourselves did not create be- 
tween the inner and the outer? What, again, are 
those Kantian categories of the mental life a priori 
to our thinking? Without them we could not think 
at all, and yet before we are they were, from ever- 
lasting to everlasting, even as the Creator Himself, 
who is their source. What, once more, are those 
principles of logic according to which we think? 
They too are in us, but not of us; yet without them 
we could not think at all. They too are, in a large 
sense, not of us, but of the over-world of which 
we partake, and which is a part of each of us. 

So likewise in the spiritual world the soul com- 
pletes itself because it partakes of powers not of it- 
self, powers that ever were and shall be for ever- 
more, and of which all finite souls partake. Faith 
and prayer, assurance of forgiveness, mystical in- 
sight, and prophetic vision may, indeed, puzzle the 
metaphysicians; but by them the powers of the in- 
visible world are made available, and the greatest 
moral triumphs do occur, both in individual lives 
and the social order. 

And if one rests intellectually ill content until 
these powers of the invisible world be named, let 
him venture to name them just as his mother taught 

88 



The Social Fruits of the Spiritual Life 

him at her knee to name them: God! Metaphysics 
can not consistently offer any serious demur to that 
name, for it has no better nomenclature to suggest. 
Indeed, the history of philosophy for the last three 
thousand years consists mostly in following first this 
great thinker, and then that one into various specu- 
lative leads, only to demonstrate each in turn a blind 
pocket. What little gold they have found they have, 
one by one, poured molten into the form of that 
great name. The last century has conceded the in- 
soluble contradictions of materialistic atheism, while 
the drift of idealism has been steadily in the direc- 
tion of personalism. Meantime the ancient ineffable 
Name, ever on the reverent lips of faith, has led the 
van of social progress from Galilee to the Golden 
Gate, and now returns to light the awakening Orient. 

And among ourselves men in search of more 
depth of life and spiritual power are turning to God 
in ever-increasing numbers and passionate eagerness. 
For the spiritual life does lay hold on power. It 
does bear fruit, and its fruits are not only individual, 
they are social as well. And if we fail to explain 
how it can bear fruit, it is only necessary to point 
out the fruits that it has borne. If its proofs are 
not speculative they are pragmatic. 

But after all we shall not have to look far to dis- 

8 9 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

cover in part why this is so. For the spiritual life, 
like the intellectual life and the cultural life, diverts 
attention and activity from primitive, anti-social in- 
terests to acquired interests that are socializing. 
Our primitive, animal, untaught interests are inter- 
ests of hunger and passion and of savage strife; 
and if we devote our attentions and activities to 
these, and these alone, we inevitably clash with one 
another, and social chaos must result. But as Pro- 
fessor Ross wittily, though almost irreverently, says, 
the exerciser of dogs in training would be wise not 
to throw them a bone, but rather to set them baying 
the moon. For there might not be bone enough to 
go around, whereas there would be plenty of moon 
for all. So with the higher intellectual culture and 
spiritual interests of man. Attention and activity 
devoted to them seldom breed disagreements or gen- 
erate friction. Just to the degree that we occupy 
ourselves with these higher interests, to that degree 
does social order develop. And of all these acquired 
socializing interests to which men may devote their 
attention, and from which they may secure happiness, 
the religious interests are most cheaply produced and 
distributed among the common people. It requires 
tremendous effort and capital to distribute widely 
all the products of science, philosophy, literature, 

90 



The Social Fruits of the Spiritual Life 

and art; but men pray instinctively, the religious life 
is spontaneous, and a revival can sweep through a 
whole population redirecting the energies of the 
masses as nothing else can do. 

But the religious life is far more than a mere 
harmless diversion, a mere plaything with which chil- 
dren can be amused, so as to keep them out of mis- 
chief. It is positively socializing in a score of dif- 
ferent ways. This may be especially and emphat- 
ically said of the Christian religion. For its unique- 
ness and grandeur consists precisely in this, that it 
harnesses the religious activities and emotions to 
social sentiments, ideals, and enterprises. It stimu- 
lates instincts of sympathy and love, not only by its 
standards, but by the emotions that it generates. 
Thus men are motivated to lives of spontaneous and 
positive goodness, they are bound together by mutual 
spiritual interests of the most intimate and tender 
sort. Thus the world's capital of love is immeas- 
urably augmented, and its liabilityto hatred immeas- 
urably decreased. 

Again, the religious life, especially the Christian 
life, renders the heart right as nothing else can pos- 
sibly do. It places its emphasis upon sincerity and 
good intentions as the prime requisites. And here, 
again, it stimulates these virtues with emotions that 

9i 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

can not be tabulated. It strengthens, moreover, the 
will by its very access to those higher and invisible 
powers which no man can explain. Thus it makes 
men over, and from what has already been said of 
the social value of individual morality, its social 
value must appear. 

Not only so, but — and this is most important of 
all — religion always and everywhere has been char- 
acterized by its power to seize upon ideals, enter- 
prises, and causes, and marshal thereto fervor and 
enthusiasm that are incalculable. History is full 
of instances: the pilgrimages of the Buddhists, the 
conquests of the Mohammedans, the fanatical cru- 
sades of the Albigenses, and so on without limit. 
This fervor and activity, often tremendous, though 
sometimes fanatical, may be tamed and harnessed 
to the cause of social welfare. It may be made to 
motivate the individual moral regeneration of whole 
populations in behalf of social ideals, and it may 
be utilized in behalf of social justice. 

But why should it be attempted here to complete 
the list of reasons why the spiritual life regenerates 
men and thus regenerates society? This is not an 
argument, and even if it were it could gain nothing 
by exhaustiveness, if that were possible. Suffice it, 
therefore, to assert again what in our heart of hearts 

92 



The Social Fruits of the Spiritual Life 

we all believe, that the spiritual life does get hold 
on invisible power. And having asserted, let us 
turn to history, for history bears eloquent testimony 
to the social fruitage of the spiritual life. The great 
revivals of personal religion have always been fruit- 
ful of social consequences. One illustration may 
suffice. Green in his "Short History of the English 
People" devotes several pages to the Wesleyan re- 
vival of the eighteenth century. He says : "Religion 
carried to the hearts of the people a fresh spirit of 
moral zeal, while it purified our literature and our 
manners. A new philanthropy reformed our pris- 
ons, infused clemency and wisdom into our penal 
laws, abolished the slave-trade, and gave impulse 
to popular education. ... In the nation at large 
appeared a new moral enthusiasm which, rigid and 
pedantic as it often seemed, was still healthy in its 
social tone, and its power was seen in the disap- 
pearance of the profligacy which had disgraced the 
upper class and the foulness which had infested the 
literature ever since the restoration. ... A yet 
nobler result of the religious revival was the steady 
attempt, which has never ceased from that day to 
this, to remedy the guilt, ignorance, physical suffer- 
ing, social degradation of the profligate and the 
poor." 

93 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

Such instances might be multiplied without num- 
ber, but it is unnecessary. Our social ills are some- 
what different from those of England in the eight- 
eenth century, but they are no less serious, and prob- 
ably no less amenable to such ameliorating influ- 
ences. Who can estimate the work of such a re- 
vival of personal religion sweeping over America 
during this generation? 

But let us return to the two religious messages 
with reference to which we began: the one a plea 
for the social application of Christianity, typified in 
its chief present representative, Rauschenbusch, the 
other a plea for the spiritual life, its representative, 
Professor Eucken. One message is almost exclu- 
sively social, the other almost exclusively individual. 
But let us discern clearly that they do not contra- 
dict nor discount one another. Instead they are 
mutually supplementary. Each needs the other, and 
the people need them both. We need more social 
ends to actuate our personal religion ; we need more 
personal spirituality to vitalize our social religion. 
If these two messages, blended together in causal 
connection, as they must be if either is to be vital, 
are taken seriously to heart by clergy and people, 
they will together under God redeem the times. 



94 



VI 

The Social Benefits of Self-Denial 



The Social Benefits of Self -Denial 

A SELF-CALCULATING ethic falls very far 
short of giving a full account of human na- 
ture. Self-renunciation is a phenomenon connected 
with the most deep-seated instincts of man, and is 
therefore older, much older, than the race. Biology 
furnishes abundant testimony to this significant fact. 
The utterly rash defense of their young by animal 
mothers, and the battles of the ants in which indi- 
viduals seem to count for nothing, are cases in which 
the first law of nature seems to be set aside. But 
without this instinct the species would perish. 

The human race inherits it. However universal 
selfishness may be, this other instinct of self- 
abnegation ever remains, asserting itself at unex- 
pected times and places, often most sublimely. How 
else can we account for the heroisms of war, and 
the weary, unending toil of parents for their chil- 
dren? And whoever has observed the face of a 
youth in whose soul there was transpiring the agony 
of consecration to some great ideal may well con* 
sider what this passion is worth to the world. For 
7 97 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

without vicarious sacrifice social salvation is impos- 
sible. History is full of it. 

The opinion is advanced by some that it is wrong 
for society to accept gratis the self-sacrificing de- 
votion of Catholic nurses. Perhaps this opinion is 
valid; still there is something in the priest's reply 
who said, "But the spirit of self-sacrifice must be 
kept alive in the world!" Indeed, how bereft of its 
best things the world would at last become if this 
noble passion should cease to master and mold 
many of the choicest souls of every generation! 
An interesting catalogue might be made of the pre- 
cious possessions which this passion has contributed 
to the world. It vitalized ancient Hebrew prophet- 
ism. It motivated that missionary zeal which evan- 
gelized all Europe by the end of the tenth century, 
and promises to evangelize all the world by the end 
of the twentieth. Had no one been willing to die 
for Liberty, democracy could never have grown to 
such proportions. Stories came to us from the East 
of how young Japanese soldiers had confided fer- 
vently to their English-speaking friends that they 
hoped to die in Manchuria. Then we understood 
why Japanese losses in a charge could be one hun- 
dred per cent, but a column could not be repulsed. 

For the leadership of great reforms this spirit 

9 8 



The Social Benefits of Self-Denial 

is absoltuely necessary. "How, then, mark the true 
prophet from the false? How tell the disinterested 
sage from the ambitious impostor? The masses 
have met this difficulty by applying the rude but 
effective test of renunciation. They will not receive 
a sterner ideal unless the author renounces all that 
common men strive for. The false prophet makes 
his success the stepping-stone to power and ease, 
while the true prophet puts the world beneath his 
feet. Hence, the locust and the wild honey, the 
staff and the sheep-skin, have always been the sure 
credentials of the moral reformer."* On the other 
hand, an evangelist who knows how to develop a 
mob-craze and then capitalize it at tens of thou- 
sands of dollars, can hardly expect the benediction 
of posterity. 

It may be that the real contribution of the clergy 
of our day to social welfare and progress is in direct 
proportion to the degree of this spirit which actu- 
ates it. The temptations were never greater than 
in an epoch like ours for clergymen to become sor- 
didly professionalized; and many, no doubt, have 
gradually succumbed to the subtle temptation. 

The various new forms of philanthropy and 
social engineering now developing have given rise 

♦Ross, " Social Control," p. 359. 

99 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

to a new profession, which might be termed the 
profession of social service. Schools have already 
been established to train young men and women for 
this profession. The demand for such young per- 
sons exceeds the supply, and is increasing; but the 
pay is usually small. The passion of altruistic de- 
votion must be relied upon to furnish recruits. Con- 
secration is the door to this service. Upon the re- 
sponse depends in considerable measure the Chris- 
tianization of the social order. 

But if in our modern society we need the spirit 
of self-denial as a qualification for reform leaders, 
we need it much more in the very texture of our 
whole life. The atmosphere is charged with selfish 
individualism, which, as has been pointed out, is eat- 
ing at the vitals of our institutions. We shall never 
recover until we reinstate in some measure at least 
the austere, rigorous virtue of a stricter generation. 
The prevailing tendency nowadays seems to be to 
satisfy the cravings of human nature for happiness, 
pleasure or self-gratification, without any very deep 
or far-sighted regard to consequences. Naturally, 
therefore, the world is full of the forms of moral 
laxness repeatedly referred to, and which constitute 
the disintegrating agencies of our times. Blue laws 

xoo 



The Social Benefits of Self-Denial 

no doubt are extreme ; and the puritanical rigor that 
voluntarily accepts the standards which blue laws 
are designed to impose upon the unwilling is a harsh 
one, to be sure; but that rigor makes an adaman- 
tine virtue fit for the foundations of a great civili- 
zation. Too little such lime in the superstructure 
may imperil the walls. Such austerity is the prime 
moral need of our age. It alone can furnish us in- 
corruptible judges, honest legislators, and faithful 
executives. Nothing less can eliminate infidelity 
from our public life, and put our business life on 
the moral level demanded by the deepest needs and 
best insight of the age. And only this can restore 
the creed upon which the family is built. For it is 
always the seductive lure of illicit self-gratification 
that draws us from the straight course; and unless 
one's philosophy of life is beaten firmly into the 
warp of self-restraint, he will hardly be able to stifle 
the passion of temptation. 

We are accustomed to cast slanting remarks at 
the austerities of our fathers, and caricature the pe- 
culiarities of dress, speech, and manner that were 
associated with their austerities. The final footing 
of the columns may, however, show a balance to 
their accounts; and the time may come when we 

IOI 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

shall be characterized non-conductors of civilization. 
Doubtless the purple-clad Romans of the later am- 
phitheater poked fun at Cincinnatus. 

The decadence of this spirit of self-denial we 
find referred to in most unexpected places. For in- 
stance, in a recently-issued treatise on educational 
theory may be found the following sentences: 

"To see to it that the ideals which accumulated 
human experience has shown to be worthy and to 
make for social welfare, are safely and effectively 
transmitted from generation to generation is ob- 
viously a prime task of education. The decline of 
the ancient civilizations is generally recognized as 
having been due to the fact that the races which 
had so laboriously built up these civilizations failed 
to transmit from generation to generation the ideals 
that were essential to their perpetuation. Chief 
among these are the ideals of self-denial and self- 
sacrifice — those essential standards of human con- 
duct that have made all advancement possible. It 
is because material prosperity eliminates the con- 
ditions which give vitality and emotive force to 
these ideals, — it is for this reason that material 
prosperity, unless checked and controlled by edu- 
cative forces, tends to national and ethnic decay. 
Both Greece and Rome lacked an organized educa- 

102 



The Social Benefits of Self- Denial 

tional institution that would automatically instill 
these ideals into each generation. It remains to 
be seen whether modern education will be adequate 
to the task. Certain it is that the present tenden- 
cies in our schools toward ease and comfort and 
the lines of least resistance confirm rather than 
counteract the operation of the Zeitgeist which re- 
flects so perfectly the moral decadence that comes 
with prosperity — the letting loose the grip that our 
forefathers, who lived under sterner and harsher 
conditions, had upon the ideals of self-denial and 
self-sacrifice."* 

Moreover, the lack of these ideals shows its 
consequences in the most remote and unexpected 
ways. Take, for instance, the tendency of our so- 
ciety to stratify into classes. Scarcely anything 
could be more undesirable in a democracy, for his- 
tory warns us ominously of the volcanic upheavals 
that ultimately break up these crusts. However 
validly we may charge such formations to economic 
forces, it still remains true that the psychology o£ 
the thing is the love of display, the pride of erfiu- 
lation, and the lust of personal power. However 
prime a requisite to the prevention of this caste- 
formation a proper distribution of economic reward 

*Bagley, ** Educational Values," p. 60. 

103 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

and opportunity may be, it must be seen also that 
renunciation and humility are factors worth con- 
sidering on their own account. Advice about the 
appropriate treatment of poor men in vile raiment 
as compared with men in gold rings and goodly ap- 
parel is, indeed, quite counter to human nature ; but 
after all it actuates brotherhoods in the obscure cor- 
ners of Ephesus and Corinth, which later become 
the leaven of the world. 

Cause-loyalty and rigid renunciation of personal 
interests and inclinations are the key also to the 
labor problem. 

The growth of population always tends to over- 
supply the labor market. The purchasers of labor 
take advantage of the resulting competition among 
laborers to beat the price of labor down to bare 
means of subsistence. Consequently the sellers of 
labor have always been exploited by the buyers of 
labor. Slavery and serfdom are historic forms of 
that exploitation; wage-oppression is the contempo- 
raneous form. The great trusts may easily become 
the greatest oppressors, because they have the great- 
est advantage over individual laborers. 

To stand together and sell their labor collec- 
tively are the laborers' only escape from this op- 
pression. The tremendous power that in this way 

104 



The Social Benefits of Self-Denial 

labor could exert in its own behalf is really quite 
startling. There need be no limit to labor's share 
in production except the productivity of labor, if 
only all laborers would submerge their personal in- 
terests to the interests of their class. 

Laborers are disqualified for such co-operation 
by natural human selfishness, and by the brutalizing 
vices to which they are so apt to be addicted. Our 
liquor system not only loads the laboring man's beer 
bucket with the federal taxes the trusts should bear, 
but also debauches him beyond the capacity for effi- 
cient organization against those that hire him. 

If the leaders and the rank and file of labor 
could become imbued with a pious passion for their 
cause like that which characterized Cromwell's bri- 
gade, their contribution to the cause of industrial 
democracy might be more commensurate with the 
contribution of Cromwell and his men to the cause 
of political democracy. 

And, I dare say, the secret of individual happi- 
ness is also to be found here. Perhaps a unique 
and effective illustration of this fact may be found 
in the vogue and acceptability of Spinoza's phi- 
losophy. For, when some great thinker's guess at 
the ultimate mystery of life and things enjoys wide 
currency over a long period of time, it may be pretty 

105 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

certainly assumed that there is a core of truth in 
it which satisfies the needs of human nature. Spi- 
noza's system is fatalistic and pantheistic in its meta- 
physical aspects; but its ethical outcome is in what 
he calls the love of God. By this he really means 
a willing, submissive absorption in and obedience 
to Nature. "Our life is a battle between surrender 
to the phenomenal world and ascent to the world of 
reality, obstinate clinging to petty individualism and 
willing absorption in Infinite Being. . . . Spinoza 
feels the traditional ideals of conduct to be unbear- 
ably small and petty, since, whatever the breadth 
they may seem to have, they do not take man out 
of himself and the sphere of his own ideas, interests, 
and emotions."* 

For purposes of our adjustment to society and 
the social awakening, as well as to our own inner 
selves, we might paraphrase Spinoza's thought by 
asserting that the secret of life is to be found in 
closer intimacy with the social cosmos and absorp- 
tion in its evolution. 

Self-denial seldom manifests itself except in con- 
nection with some strong instinct. It can not, there- 
fore, be made to order, but results as a by-product 
from the stimulation of the instinct. The three in- 

*Eucken, "The Problem of Human Life," pp. 373, 378. 

106 



The Social Benefits of Self-Denial 

stincts with which it most commonly displays itself 
are fighting, the parental instincts, and religion. 

It is the last of these with which we are now 
concerned. Any student of the ethnic religions is 
familiar with the phenomena of self-inflicted tor- 
tures and fanatical devotion to superstitious enter- 
prises that take heavy toll of life. As for our own 
religion, who can forget what it has cost its devo- 
tees! 

It is characteristic of the Christian religion that 
it seized upon this, as upon other socializing in- 
stincts, magnified and idealized it, and so gave it 
tremendous force in the world. This feature of 
Christianity, however, is hardly recognized in these 
days, because the spirit of the times is so contrary 
to it. Nor do we fully appreciate the emphasis that 
early Christianity placed upon self-denial. So ex- 
treme is the emphasis to-day upon social religion 
and programs for the betterment of this world that 
the other-worldly character of apostolic and patris- 
tic Christianity is largely forgotten. We also inter- 
pret this element out of the teachings of Jesus Him- 
self, thereby doing violence to His thought. 

But as a matter of fact, the early Christians were 
dwellers in tents. They were but pilgrims here, 
journeying home to an abiding country. It was not 

107 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

the visible, but the invisible world which was real 
to them. So temporary, indeed, was the world, so 
transient their lives in it, that nothing of weal or 
woe was counted of much consequence. It was only 
under the inspiration of this faith that they were 
able to bear what they had to bear. If the blood 
of the martyrs was the seed of the Church, it fol- 
lows that without this spirit of self-denial Chris- 
tianity could never have taken root in the world. 

What was true of the early Church has been 
more or less true at every epoch in her history. And 
if by lightening the emphasis upon other-worldliness 
we should lose the motive for self-denial, it would 
be a sorry shift indeed for the world that now is. 
There ought to be no danger, however; for the in- 
creasing social interest, not to say passion, of the 
present time, together with the more enlightened 
insight into the social consequences of self-indul- 
gence, ought to more than make up for the lack of 
that early, semi-fanatical other-worldliness. And 
it is devoutly to be hoped that religion may assume 
a form in America and take on a fervor that shall 
revive its early spirit of self-denial. Consecration 
is a good word yet! 



108 



VII 

The Social Function of the Church 



The Social Function of the Church 

EDUCATORS are guided in their professional 
work by a philosophy of education in which 
there is formulated a systematic theory of the ends 
of education, the means and methods adapted to 
each of the various ends, and the relative value of 
the respective means and ends. This body of stand- 
ardized theory is of great value, for it rescues our 
educational system from the blunders and waste of 
empiricism. 

The clergy also seriously needs such a philoso- 
phy, some authorized and well-grounded and thor- 
oughly-worked-out concensus of opinion as to what 
the Church is for, how the ends for which it exists 
are to be realized, and the relative value and impor- 
tance of the various kinds of Church activity. Un- 
fortunately, however, they do not possess such a 
philosophy of the ecclesiastical function. The result 
is great confusion. Various conceptions of the ends 
and aims of ecclesiastical activity are more or less 
explicitly held by this one or that one. A great 
variety of new theories abound which lead to experi- 

m 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

mentation; or the older and traditional perpetuates 
itself through sheer inertia. But nowhere is there 
any balance, adjustment, or authority. 

To illustrate the condition referred to and at the 
same time introduce the problem of the Church's 
social function, there might be enumerated two dif- 
ferent and apparently contradictory theories as to 
the Church's function which are commonly in vogue. 
First, that the Church exists in order to save indi- 
viduals from hell; second, that its business is to re- 
construct and save the social order. 

The first of these dominated the Middle Ages 
and is still extant among us. It explains the vast 
majority of Church activities of the past, and per- 
haps also of the present as well. As held in its ex- 
treme form, it utterly ignores and sometimes ex- 
plicitly denies the second end mentioned. 

The second, on the other hand, has enjoyed an 
immense vogue of late, though it may have had 
some incidental recognition always. As now ad- 
vocated in some quarters, however, there is some 
tendency manifested to make it imply complete re- 
pudiation of the latter. 

It will be seen that on the basis of either of 
these two theories alone there inevitably arises un- 
certainty and confusion, and that uncertainty often 

112 



The Social Function of the Church 

avenges itself in practice by the inadequacy and in- 
completeness of the work resulting. 

An attempt to compromise these two theories 
might be stated somewhat as follows : that the busi- 
ness of the Church is to make men fit either for so- 
ciety or for heaven. But here again the necessity 
for a thoroughly worked out philosophy of the 
Church's function is evident. For this proposition 
assumes that fitness for society is fitness for heaven. 
But, abandoning this assumption and the puzzles 
that it might lead to, another puzzle may be noted 
which is involved in the proposition; viz., whether 
the Church should approach the individual directly 
or through his environment. And if directly, should 
it be by inspiration chiefly, or by instruction, regi- 
men, habituation, etc. And if indirectly through 
society, the question arises whether society or the 
individual is, in the last analysis, the end of its 
activity. 

But it is only the intent here to suggest the de- 
sirability of such a system of thought as has been 
referred to, and to hint at some of the problems in- 
volved in it. Manifestly, if these puzzles could be 
reduced, and a systematic philosophy of the Church's 
function provided, we should be able to reduce the 
various activities of the Church to a much more just 
8 113 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

proportion, and so accomplish incomparably more 
with a given amount of energy expended. 

Without attempting, however, to answer the the- 
oretical questions raised, let us proceed to some dis- 
cussion of the social function of the Church. We 
may, perhaps, safely begin by laying down the prop- 
osition that there are two ways at least in which the 
Church may proceed in the performance of its social 
function. The first is the endeavor to better society 
directly by changing for the better social conditions 
and social organs. The second is to better society 
indirectly by improving the individuals that compose 
society. 

The first of these is of great importance. It is 
the aim of the modern social awakening. It is the 
gist of social religion in the present stage of its de- 
velopment. It characterizes the spirit of the age. 
This social aim is motivating as never before all our 
intellectual activities : science, politics, literature, 
philanthropy, as well as religion. There are various 
ways in which the Church may seek to assist in this 
contemporaneous movement for the betterment of 
society. She may preach the social ideal and point 
out its place in the thought of the Founder, thus 
inspiring with this socio-religious motive millions of 
people who can be reached in no other way. This 

114 



The Social Function of the Church 

the Church is doing as a matter of fact. Countless 
sermons have been preached during the past decade 
on the social application of Christianity. Millions 
of Christian people have been interested in the so- 
cial teachings of Jesus and have read books on social 
religion. 

Another thing that the Church can do is to co- 
operate with philanthropic enterprise and reform 
movement. This also she is doing to a degree that 
perhaps is not adequately appreciated. Through 
the Federal Council of Churches she has taken a 
stand for the minimum wage; through the Na- 
tional Child-labor Committee, for the betterment of 
working conditions; the churches also have co- 
operated largely in the anti-vice campaign, and are 
taking an important part in the agitation for acci- 
dent-indemnity laws. Many further activities of this 
kind might be enumerated. 

Such co-operation as this with philanthropy and 
reforms, it may be noted, are not usually local en- 
terprises for the local Church, but instead are causes 
which, like the missionary cause, must be furthered 
through the central agencies of a whole denomina- 
tion, or even by several denominations in co-opera- 
tion with one another. Denominational alignment 
for a great enterprise has been successfully accom- 

"5 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

plished by modern Christendom in the interests of 
foreign missions, and to some extent in the interests 
of temperance. These lessons as to what may be 
accomplished in behalf of a great cause by inter- 
denominational alignment and mutual co-operation 
should be pondered well. For they suggest to all 
thoughtful advocates of social reform what may be 
accomplished by the Churches for such causes as 
child-labor, industrial accidents, eugenics, and a 
score of other social interests, if the whole body of 
Christians could unite effectively in their behalf, as 
they have been able to unite and co-operate in behalf 
of foreign missions. We already have the begin- 
nings of organizations to that end, notably the Fed- 
eral Council of the Churches of Christ in America. 
There is no more inspiring subject for meditation 
than to consider what can be accomplished in behalf 
of the practical interests of the Kingdom when this 
alignment shall have been perfected. 

Another thing that must come and will naturally 
come as a by-product of the movements we have 
just been speaking of, will be the elimination of de- 
nominational competition and the waste accompany- 
ing it. We seriously need a redistribution of eccle- 
siastical energy and activity from over-churched 
rural districts, where the competitive struggle is 

116 



The Social Function of the Church 

wasting men, money, and devotion, to the un- 
churched and neglected slums of our great cities. 
Thousands of young ministers are laboring in coun- 
try places oppressed beyond expression by the reali- 
zation that the little community in which they live 
would be as well or better off if their own Churches 
were removed entirely and the field left to those that 
remain. These same young men, many of them, have 
seen the social vision and are praying daily with 
almost passionate entreaties that opportunity may 
be given them to devote their services to the social 
regeneration and salvation of our great neglected 
centers. Here is perhaps the most pressing problem 
in religious strategy that now presents itself to our 
captains of ecclesiasticism. 

Perhaps the form in which the problem of the 
Church's social function presents itself most fre- 
quently, especially to that class of young clergymen 
to whom reference has just been made, is the ques- 
tion of what the local Church can do in matters of 
local social service and activity. Feeling the call of 
the social ideal, but failing to realize either that the 
chief social work of the Church must be done either 
through denominational co-operation with the re- 
forms just mentioned, or through the regeneration 
of individuals, to which we shall proceed in a mo- 

117 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

ment, these young men have otten sought to trans- 
form their local Churches into philanthropic and 
charitable institutions or into social centers. This 
tendency has given rise to the institutional Church 
in the city and to the community-life Church in the 
country. 

While the social aspiration that has given rise 
to these experiments is no doubt laudable in the 
highest degree, still it must be conceded that this 
zeal has often developed in a one-sided, fanatical 
way. Perhaps more of these enterprises have failed 
than have succeeded, so that the whole question of 
the adequacy and permanence of this kind of Church 
work is still in question. 

The Church, however, is not the only institution 
thus embarrassed by the rise of this new social zeal. 
A few years ago in one of the Central States of the 
Middle West there gathered at a well-known center 
of pedagogical learning a large group of persons, 
mostly young women, under the auspices of a new 
and enthusiastic organization known as the Country 
Teachers' Association. The inspiring genius of this 
meeting was a person of charming grace and mag- 
netic personality, who was full of enthusiasm for the 
country-life movement. This leader was able to see 
visions and dream dreams as to the possibilities of 

118 



The Social Function of the Church 

country-life improvement and the function and op- 
portunity of the country school teacher in connection 
therewith. The whole program was inspirational in 
the extreme, and the ideal carried the delegates to 
the highest pitch of enthusiasm. At the critical mo- 
ment in the program, just as the young teachers were 
pledging themselves to exert their influence in the 
districts to which they were about to go, in behalf 
of the movement under consideration, there pre- 
sented himself before the audience a middle-aged 
man of striking appearance. His face was cadaver- 
ous and somewhat cynical in its expression, but his 
eye was keen and twinkled with humor and common 
sense. He proved to be a prominent educational of- 
ficial of the State, and with a speech markedly sug- 
gestive of the Fatherland he spoke as follows: 

"Ve are here to-day on the Moundain of Drans- 
figuration. Led us build three dabernagles, etc." 
Thus he proceeded, gradually and humorously feel- 
ing his way to a mastery of the situation, which by 
tact and skill he at length secured. The general 
drift of his remarks may be surmised from the con- 
cluding paragraph of his extemporaneous address, 
which was as follows: 

"The pusiness of the coundry school deacher is 
to deach school. If she makes good at that she 

119 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

might perhaps interest the farmers a little in better 
roads and better social life. But if she begins by 
making a hobby of rural community building, like 
as not she '11 forget to deach the children to read. 
Then de directors vill say, 'Another fool from the 
normal school.' " 

The present situation in the Church relative to 
social activities is not altogether different from that 
suggested by this incident. The present writer must 
confess that he went away from that convention of 
teachers with a paraphrased version of the German 
pedagogue's philosophy ringing in his ears. "The 
pusiness of the breacher is to breach the gospel." 
And this philosophy may well impress itself deeply 
upon the minds of the contemporaneous clergy. 
They may well repeat again and again in thoughtful 
soliloquy, "The business of the preacher is to preach 
the gospel." 

And this leads us to the second way in which the 
Church may improve society, namely, by improving 
the character of the individuals who compose society. 
It is in this way that the preaching of the gospel 
has far more significant social consequences than 
many of us are apt to realize. The social value of 
the ordinary work of the ordinary Church is not 
to be judged by its conscious social aims alone, for 

1 20 



The Social Function of the Church 

it may well be that it is not consciously social in its 
aims. Its social significance is rather to be judged 
from the standpoint of its social effects. And it is 
to these that consideration here is to be directed. 
For a vast amount of social betterment may be ac- 
complished simply by improving the character of the 
individuals who compose society. And this ordinary 
work the Church actually accomplishes with remark- 
able efficiency. 

The Church sets up and maintains from genera- 
tion to generation the moral standards so necessary 
to the maintenance of social order. It approves or 
disapproves the members of the community with re- 
spect to their conformity to these standards^ and 
succeeds in a remarkable degree in pressing its ap- 
praisals upon the whole community. It teaches not 
only adults, but the children of each rising genera- 
tion the thou-shalts and the thou-shalt-nots of the 
moral law perhaps more universally and effectively 
than any other social organ could possibly do. 

Moreover, the Church inculcates beliefs and 
faiths which motivate human behavior to an incom- 
parable degree. These beliefs and faiths permeate 
the whole community and constitute an important 
element of the social atmosphere. Nobody has to 
explain these beliefs in the course of conversation 

121 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

with his neighbor; he assumes that his neighbor un- 
derstands them and perhaps accepts them, and that 
assumption is valid because of the work of the 
Church. These beliefs and faiths are with men in 
solitude as well as in society, and patrol their be- 
havior while the policeman is asleep. 

But perhaps the most significant of all is the 
body of spiritual ideals and feelings which the 
Church in all the centuries has fostered. Emotions 
and ideals — and an ideal is but a great proposition 
emotionally conceived — are the mainspring of 
human activity. When these enthusiasms dwindle, 
life is dwarfed and its value sinks to a low ebb. 
Then the appetites and passions of the baser nature 
break from their restraints, and chaos and pande- 
monium are the program of the day? 

Thus the Church stands like a sentinel from age 
to age guarding the citadel of social order. 

Not only may it be said that this is the function 
of the Church, but it may also be added that only 
as the agency of this function is institutionalized can 
it perform the function. The tasks of social control 
do not, many of them, perform themselves. On the 
other hand, they are performed by institutions, and 
these institutions must be built upon solid, substantial 
foundations of organization and support. Other- 

122 



The Social Function of the Church 

wise the old adage that what is everybody's business 
is nobody's business is illustrated again, and pres- 
ently the function ceases to be performed. However 
imperfect the Church may be as to its organization 
and personnel (and what else could be expected 
among faulty human beings?), it is not imperfect 
with respect to its ideals. But these ideals would 
gradually fade away were they not conserved and 
promulgated by a stable institution organized and 
maintained for that very purpose. 

And the efficiency with which the Church has per- 
formed this function is the very reason why we fail 
to perceive the function itself. Our whole social 
atmosphere is so permeated with what the Church 
has contributed to it that we are as unconscious of 
it as we are unconscious of the air and the sunshine, 
and for precisely the same reasons. This moral at- 
mosphere which the Church has generated is the 
very medium in which we live and, unconscious of 
it, devote our attention to our every-day affairs. But 
notice how these moral standards do permeate the 
community. In the dooryard of the humble or in 
the nurseries of the rich accost any child of a dozen 
years of age and ask him what is right or wrong, 
and why, and you will presently learn that immedi- 
ately or by proxy he has been sitting at the feet of 

123 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

the Church. The readiness with which hypocrites 
in the Church are condemned by those outside the 
Church is convincing evidence of the success with 
which the Church has performed her task of teach- 
ing all the world what the Christian virtues are. 
Nor are we to estimate the Church's influence in 
the community solely by the numbers who frequent 
the church-building itself. For we are well aware 
that the large percentage of the people, even those 
who have not darkened the door of the church for 
many years, are yet fairly well informed as to what 
ideals and hopes, beliefs and faiths, and moral stand- 
ards the Church stands for. Moreover, they are 
far from being unmoved by the public opinion which 
the Church has generated. No better illustration of 
this fact can be cited than the all but universal de- 
mand in time of death for a religious funeral. 

Again, imagine the Church eliminated from the 
community. How, then, would these motives 
and standards of behavior, these foundations of so- 
cial order, be maintained? The public school by 
common consent is deplorably inadequate to the task, 
not only in America, where religious instruction is 
debarred, but also in Europe, where it is explicitly 
fostered. Literature and the theater could not be 
relied upon to supply the deficency, for they both 

124 



The Social Function of the Church 

cater notoriously to the commercial demand, vend- 
ing that which sells the best. And it is a historic 
fact, instanced, for example, by the English litera- 
ture of the eighteenth century, that a corrupt age 
demands corrupt literature. Law and the policy 
could not meet the need, for they can only repress 
the occasional offender, and their success depends 
upon the spontaneous good behavior of the vast ma- 
jority. Tradition might be relied u£on for a time, 
but only for a time. Religion and morals could not 
die out, to be sure, for the first is an instinct of 
human nature, and the second is a social necessity 
without which civilization can not continue. Nature 
would in time reassert herself, therefore, and the in- 
stitutions which we have imagined eliminated, or 
something designed with an identical end in view, 
would spring spontaneously into existence again. 

The most significant testimonial to the social 
effects of the Church's ordinary ministration to the 
moral and spiritual needs of individuals may be 
gathered from the history of the Dark Ages. Dur- 
ing this period the work of the Church was devoted 
almost exclusively to individuals. The social func- 
tions of the Church and of religion were almost 
totally undreamed of, so much so that for centuries 
the ideal held up was that the best possible life and 

I2 5 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

the most proper means of salvation was the most 
complete withdrawal from society. Nevertheless it 
was during these centuries that the Church accom- 
plished the most important social function that she 
has ever accomplished, and perhaps the most impor- 
tant function that has ever been accomplished by 
any institution. For notice, at the date of the down- 
fall of Rome the world was populated with the de- 
moralized and decadent Roman peoples and the bar- 
barous invaders from the north. These two races 
were in violent conflict, and all the safeguards of 
life, property, and happiness were destroyed to- 
gether in the general catastrophe. Almost nothing 
remained intact but the Christian Church, to which 
the Romans gave spiritual allegiance, and to which 
the Germans either had been converted or were to 
be converted in a few centuries. The task that con- 
fronted the Church, the task that characterized the 
Middle Ages was to tame, civilize, and socialize the 
violent elements of this turbulent society, training 
them to social order and laying the foundations for 
modern civilization. 

Of this outlook the Church of the sixth century 
was almost totally ignorant. She was also totally 
unaware of the fact that this task confronted her. 
She was, instead, imbued with the purpose of pro- 

126 



The Social Function of the Church 

tecting her property and her devotees, and saving 
the souls of the people, both Roman and barbarian, 
from hell. These tasks she sought to accomplish 
by bringing the minds of the barbarians into the 
most abject submission to her creeds and ritual. 
This she succeeded in doing, and there followed a 
thousand years of ecclesiastical authority and sub- 
ordination of the individual will to that authority 
in all matters of intellectual and spiritual interest. 
And the result every student of history well knows. 
Little by little she developed the intellectual and 
moral life of the European peoples. Gradually they 
became civilized, until the social task of the medi- 
aeval Church bore full fruitage in the Renaissance, 
the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the rise 
of modern democracy. 

And all this may well be taken as a type of the 
social service that is always being accomplished by 
the Church that performs its usual tasks from age 
to age, and which is, of course, augmented with in- 
creased activity and influence on the part of the 
Church. 

There are hundreds of ministers who are op- 
pressed with the burden and futility of their work. 
They are discouraged because they see neither souls 
being saved in large numbers nor social work being 

127 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

accomplished. The chief necessity of such men is 
an enlargement of their conception of the Church's 
function, and a deeper insight into the social conse- 
quences of the moral and spiritual life to the fos- 
tering of which the Church devotes herself from 
year to year. Let such ministers live the spiritual 
life themselves, and minister to the spiritual needs 
of the people. Let them keep their churches painted 
and the church-bells ringing, thus presenting, as it 
were, pleasing sensory symbols of the spiritual life 
to the ears and eyes of the populace. Let them 
preach the gospel faithfully every Sunday to such as 
willingly come to the church, gathering in as many 
as they can. Let them see that as large a fraction 
as possible of the children are taught from week to 
week the fundamentals of Christian faith, morals, 
and ideals. Let them visit the homes of the people 
and befriend such people as will welcome their 
friendship. Let them marry happy lovers and bap- 
tize innocent children. Let them bury the dead and 
invoke the divine blessing upon all social functions 
where they are invited to do so. Let them surround 
themselves with as large a constituency as possible 
of faithful Christian Church members. And let 
them remember that the same thing is being done in 
every village and in every ward of every city in the 

128 



The Social Function of the Church 

whole broad land. Let them thus feel themselves 
companioned by an innumerable host of those who 
are doing the same work as they, a work more vital 
to the stability of society and the moral and social 
progress of mankind than any other work whatso- 
ever. 

And let the conscientious layman who helps to 
pay the bills and do the work of the Church and 
exemplify the Christian life take heart. For it is 
through such as he that the social application of 
Christianity is most effectively being accomplished. 

Let this part of the discussion be concluded, 
therefore, with two special pleas. The first is for 
the evangelization of the un-churched centers of 
our population, those congested sections of our great 
cities which have been so aptly characterized as 
"folk swamps." If the circuit-rider evangelizing 
the rural slums of our frontier three-quarters of a 
century ago exerted as great an influence upon the 
morals and intelligence of the settlers as he is cred- 
ited by some of our historians with doing, why is 
not the urban slum amenable to similar influences? 
As a matter of fact, what Peter Cartwright did 
among the swamps of Central Illinois, Booth has 
done among the folk-swamps of London. Our 
cities need social settlements, but some of those who 
9 129 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

have conducted the most successful social settlements 
are reputed to have confessed that the people need 
even more the preaching of the gospel. 

The second plea is in behalf of the children and 
their devotion to the Church. It is of the greatest 
importance that they be taught by precept and by 
example to frequent the services of the Church and 
revere its teachings and influence. It will be a great 
day for America and for American life and civiliza- 
tion when a preponderating majority of her children 
have learned to sing in sweet childish simplicity: 

"I love Thy church, O God! 
Her walls before Thee stand, 
Dear as the apple of Thine eye 
And graven on Thy hand." 



130 



VIII 

The Social Need of a Religious 
Awakening 



The Social Need of a Religious 
Awakening 

THE pessimist and the calamity howler are the 
most unwelcome members of American society. 
The prediction that the country is going to the dogs 
furnishes perennial grist for the funny-paper mill. 
Our conceit prefers the superlatives of the typical 
old-time orator with his "grandest civilization upon 
which the sun ever shone," and his "sublimest hero- 
ism that was ever displayed upon the bloody field 
of battle." We are confident that our resources are 
limitless and our future immeasurably glorious. Are 
not we of Anglo-Saxon blood in this the United 
States of America? 

It irritates us a little to be told that our public 
out-door charities fail because we are gifted with 
the most administrative awkwardness of any civil- 
ized people in the world. It really angers us to be 
laughed at by the Germans because of our back- 
wardness in the practical application of science. We 
are a trifle chagrined to compare our military sani- 
tation and our death rates in Cuba with the Japanese 

133 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

record in Manchuria. It is a rather rude awaken- 
ing to be urged in the midst of a political campaign 
to favor progressive legislation that Europe has had 
in successful operation for more than a generation. 
Our inability to see the hole in the doughnut is droll 
indeed. But since blind optimism is one of the symp- 
toms of tuberculosis, the friend who warns against 
dampness, darkness, and dirt should hardly be stig- 
matized for the unpardonable sin of blind pessimism. 
There probably never has been an age of greater 
promise than the present. That promise of the fu- 
ture is based upon an unparalleled material develop- 
ment, upon rising democracy, upon increasing intelli- 
gence and the development of science, and upon an 
expanding sympathy and humanitarianism. Con- 
sidering what we have succeeded in accomplishing 
in the last two centuries, and the capital that we have 
acquired for further progress, it does seem gratui- 
tous indeed to suggest the possibility of ultimate 
failure and collapse on the part of our splendid 
civilization. But there have been other periods of 
achievement and progress. The most notable 
among these perhaps are the period of the Greek 
enlightenment and the period of the Renaissance. 
Nevertheless the promise of both of these epochs 
was disappointed. The historic tragedy occurred, 

134 



The Social Need of a Religious Awakening 

in the first instance, of a civilization gradually crum- 
bling into decay, and in the second instance the bright 
promises of progress were postponed for half a 
thousand years. For alongside of the constructive 
forces that gave rise to the hopes of these epochs 
there were also destructive forces at work, and these 
destructive forces, though unnoticed at the time, 
proved more potent in the end than the constructive. 

It may be so with us to-day. Some of our most 
constructive writers admit this possibility.* 

The study of these former epochs is instructive 
indeed. The Greek or Roman civilization culmi- 
nated in some of its phases at the period of the 
Greek enlightenment and in other phases during the 
Augustinian age. That civilization was character- 
ized, through the earlier part of these centuries 
especially, with intellectual achievement of the first 
magnitude, with democratic political institutions not 
wholly different from some of ours and in commer- 
cial activities of great volume and extent. Upon the 
basis of these, and these alone, boundless hopes 
might legitimately have been founded; but there 
were also other forces at work. Among these was a 
bad distribution of wealth through the Greco-Roman 

*See Ross' "Social Control," p. 436; Rauschenbusch's "Christianizing the 
Social Order," p. 29; Eucken's " The Problem of Human Life," p. 300; Bagley's 
" Educational Values," p. 61. 

135 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

world and the breakdown of the family, especially 
among the Romans. But the most destructive social 
force of the period was positive individualism. This 
expressed itself explicitly and with open avowal in 
Greek philosophy. Epicurianism and Stoicism were 
both hedonistic at heart, and the Sophists asserted as 
their central maxim that the individual is the stand- 
ard and criterion in everything. It manifested itself 
in the rebellion against convention in Greek morals 
and the almost universal skepticism as to the author- 
ity of duty. All this took a practical form in the 
excessive personal ambitions and the unrestrained 
individual competition that prevailed in Greek so- 
ciety, and, what was perhaps worse, between Greek 
states. As for the Greek religion, it was utterly 
devoid of any such co-operative ideals as we now 
possess in Christianity. All this gave rise to centrif- 
ugal movements, resulting in the moral and social 
decadence of the first century, which Rogers, in his 
history of philosophy, characterizes in the following 
words : 

"The rapidly increasing corruption of the ruling 
class, the glaring contrasts of luxury and misery, the 
insecurity of life and property, the sense of world- 
weariness which marked the passing away of moral 
enthusiasms, all brought home to man the feeling 

136 



The Social Need of a Religious Awakening 

that the world was growing old and that some moral 
catastrophe was impending." 

But imagine Aristides or Alexander approached 
with the suggestion that the ancient world was mov- 
ing toward a dark age. Imagine Pericles or Aris- 
totle, or even Cicero or Caesar, foreseeing the col- 
lapse of ancient civilization. Nevertheless, blind as 
they were to the facts, these destructive forces were 
at work, and ultimately brought forth their fruits. 

The Renaissance epoch, with the period imme- 
diately following, is equally interesting. Dante and 
half a score of lesser literary geniuses were adding 
their names to the list of the immortals. The hori- 
zon of the earth was being widened by the discovery 
of the great navigators, and the boundary of the 
universe was being extended by the great astrono- 
mers. Commercial and industrial developments 
were greater than Europe had ever seen before. 
And several important inventions had stimulated the 
imagination of men with the possibilities of applied 
science. No wonder Moore was inspired by these 
events to Utopian dreams, and Erasmus hoped for 
the time when the Golden Rule should dominate di- 
plomacy and government exist for the benefit of the 
governed. 

Nevertheless these bright dreams and alluring 

137 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

promises were doomed to disappointment, and the 
centuries following were drenched in the blood of 
peasants' rebellions and religious wars. Religious 
liberty miscarried, the Reformation degenerated 
into a brood of warring sects, and rising democracy 
was crushed under the tyrannous heels of Henry 
VIII and Charles V. 

In casting about for the causes of this disap- 
pointment they may be discovered principally in a 
single fact; viz., the superstitious ignorance of the 
masses of the common people. This ignorance was 
the destructive force which successfully held in check 
for nearly five centuries all the constructive forces 
upon which the hopes of the age were based. There 
is always a certain aggregate of forces at work in 
society, whether in our age or any other. And it 
stands to reason that while some of these forces are 
constructive, some also are destructive ; and the ques- 
tion may always be legitimately and wisely raised 
whether the destructive or constructive forces pre- 
dominate in the balance of power. It is always well 
to make sane, thoughtful, optimistic investigation 
of the enemy's position and forces, so as to make 
sure of victory in the inevitable engagement. It 
must be admitted, and all wise friends of progress 
will be willing to admit it, that some of the disinte- 

138 



The Social Need of a Religious Awakening 

grating forces that were operative in these previous 
epochs are also operative among us to-day. 

First may be mentioned the tendency to appraise 
wealth above life. Numerous manifestations of this 
phenomenon might be remarked. There is the will- 
ingness to fatten the federal fisc at the crib of the 
liquor interests and pay the bills of the National Gov- 
ernment with the miserable forfeitures of drunken- 
ness. There is the glaring inequitableness of our 
distribution of wealth, which Professor Patton char- 
acterizes by asserting that only twenty-five per cent 
of our population have shared in the benefits of our 
material progress. There is the terrible toll of 
industrial accident and disease, and the exploitation 
of childhood in the interests of gain. All of these 
manifestations of the accumulation of wealth at the 
expense of man are brought into even clearer light 
by the very protest which is being so effectively raised 
against them of late. 

Another evidence of the destructive forces at 
work in our society is the prevalence of vice and the 
diseases and death that follow in its wake. Again, 
there are the disappointments of democratic govern- 
ment displayed in the corrupt dominance of the great 
financial interest and in the shameful political de- 
bauchery of so many of our cities. 

139 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

Again, there is the decreasing fecundity of our 
native white race, indicated by population statistics. 
This even raises the question whether our native 
population may not ultimately be supplanted by de- 
scendants of immigrants, and whether the civiliza- 
tion our forefathers have produced can be appreci- 
ated and transmitted to the future by alien races 
such as are now flocking to our shores. 

It will be seen that under all these moral phe- 
nomena there lies a common cause; viz., the exag- 
gerated individualism of the present age. Individu- 
alism as an ethical philosophy is hedonistic. It be- 
lieves that the purpose of life is pleasure, and that 
the value of life is to be measured in the amount 
of pleasure which the individual secures. It can 
not bear restraints. It suffocates with disappoint- 
ment. It is egotistical and selfish. It repudiates 
duties, ignores responsibilities, and seeks to attain 
its ends without regard to the like ends of others. 
It interprets personal liberty into license, and refuses 
to limit freedom by voluntary responsibility. 

The individualist has habituated this philosophy 
of life into his mode of action so thoroughly that 
the philosophy is not held explicitly but implicitly 
and subconsciously. The individualist can not 
brook failure of his plans or miscarriage of his am- 

140 



The Social Need of a Religious Awakening 



bitions. He passes his way but once, and therefore 
he insists passionately upon plucking the flowers that 
grow along the way. For he is impressed with the 
fact that he can never return to gather what he has 
missed. The individualist is a willful child and a 
selfish brother, a domineering husband and a tyran- 
nous father, grasping in business, unsympathetic and 
disobliging as a neighbor, self-centered as a citizen, 
and self-seeking as a public servant. 

It must be conceded that individualism as a sub- 
conscious habituated philosophy of life is extremely 
prevalent among us. And the causes are not far to 
seek. It is a by-product of the rise of democracy 
and comes from that one-sided interpretation of dem- 
ocratic principles which emphasizes its benefits, but 
fails to recognize its responsibilities. It arises also 
out of the intellectual freedom of the age, the fact 
that men are no longer under the bonds of dogma- 
tism, but instead, freedom of thought is the motto 
of the times. By this freedom selfish men are un- 
leashed from the restraints of controlling beliefs and 
ideals. But principally it is the result of the com- 
mercialism of the age and the emphasis that it has 
laid. Wealth is a means primarily to self-gratifica- 
tion; and in an age especially devoted to wealth- 
getting, self-gratification is the inevitable conse- 

141 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

quence. Moreover, the sense of power that results 
from the possession of wealth can not but augment 
this sentiment. The effects are evident everywhere 
in the starting up of the screws of duty that hold 
society together. Individualism is the disease that 
is giving rise to nearly all of the symptoms of moral 
decay just enumerated. In addition to these it has 
generated the current obtuseness of mind relative 
to the higher spiritual values. 

These constitute a sufficiently complete list of the 
disintegrating forces that are at work in modern 
society. The similiarity to the forces that have 
blighted former ages is strikingly evident, and they 
may well receive the thoughtful consideration of 
serious men and women. 

The great medicine needed is a more adequate 
supply of moral earnestness on the part of all our 
people. Just as the general ignorance of the masses 
brought to naught the bright promises of the Re- 
naissance, so the loose moral adjustments of our 
modern life, as indicated in the preceding para- 
graphs, are our serious danger. Exaggerated indi- 
vidualism, precisely the same cause that undermined, 
more than any other, the Greco-Roman civilization, 
is at work among the foundations of our own civili- 
zation. We need a firm socio-personal morality; 

142 



The Social Need of a Religious Awakening 

that is, a personal morality that sees its ends in the 
general welfare. We need to develop as a motive 
for this morality a greater volume and intensity of 
socio-personal religion; that is, a religion that finds 
its ideals, its enthusiasms, and its motives in the so- 
cial welfare. 

The possibilities along this line have scarcely 
been realized. It seems entirely practicable to hope 
that limitless moral resources may be developed here, 
for without doubt humanity is as religious at heart 
to-day as in any preceding age. To be sure, reli- 
gious energy may be latent rather than active, but 
its occasional almost volcanic local eruptions under 
the leadership of professional revivalists seems to 
indicate that it is available. The capacity for faith, 
spiritual longing, and devotion to religious enter- 
prises is surely as great as ever. If only the souls 
of our contemporaries could be led to see the divine 
plan in social relations, and God's law in the moral 
law, and salvation in the social life, there is no telling 
what might result in behalf of social betterment. 

There is probably more sympathy and altruism 
in the world per capita than ever before. It could 
hardly be otherwise, considering the growth of de- 
mocracy and enlightenment during the past century 
and a half, and it is evident in the humanitarian 

143 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

movements of the last generation. If only this sym- 
pathy and altruism could be utilized as a motive for 
moral life, if only men could be led to see the dire 
consequences to their loved ones and to society of 
vicious lives, this growing sympathy might be utilized 
for the realization of the Kingdom of God among us. 

But above all there is a tremendous amount of 
social interest and idealism. How else can we ac- 
count for the almost fanatical display of feeling that 
seems capable of developing during political cam- 
paigns? How else can we account for the growth 
of socialism and of the labor movement? How 
else can we explain the tremendously increased inter- 
est in the social sciences, the development of philan- 
thropy, and the spread of social religion? If only 
this social interest and altruism could be attached 
to the cause of individual moral regeneration, it 
might lift our nation and our people to a safe moral 
level, as a raft may be made to lift a sunken dere- 
lict out of the sand and mud of a river bottom when 
the tide comes in. 

Such a moral regeneration as this, flowering 
forth out of the latent religious capacity of the 
people, out of the growing sympathy of the modern 
man and the budding social interests, is a regener- 
ation worthy of our day-dreams and our prayers; 

144 



The Social Need of a Religious Awakening 

for day-dreams and prayers may vitally contribute 
to its actual realization. 

Stranger things have happened. We have all 
read of that great movement of the Middle Ages 
which marshaled all Western Europe to the enter- 
prise of recapturing the Holy Sepulcher from the 
infidels. What a display of religious devotion, en- 
ergy, and sacrifice to a great though mistaken ideal, 
to a cause supposed to be in the interests of the gen- 
eral welfare ! What might it not have accomplished 
had it been more wisely directed. But does the in- 
telligence, social enthusiasm, and the religious fervor 
of the modern world aggregate any less than the 
religious fanaticism of that day? Does the social 
ideal appeal any less powerfully to the imagination 
of our day than the Holy Sepulcher appealed to the 
imagination of that day? 

God grant that a crusade commensurate in devo- 
tion and enthusiasm to the crusade which sought to 
rescue the Holy Sepulcher from the Saracens may en- 
list the devotion and enthusiasm of our modern age, 
to the end that the infidelity of selfishness and vice 
may be driven out and the Kingdom of God set up 
in the midst of our society. May the spirit of Peter 
the Hermit come again to some humble and fervent 
prophet from among the common people, a man 

10 i 45 



Personal Religion and the Social Awakening 

who knows the miseries and temptations, the pas- 
sions and the suffering of the masses as well as that 
earlier prophet knew the insults and indignities suf- 
fered by pilgrims to the Holy Land ! May he arouse 
the common people! May he be able to fire the 
hearts of the men in Halsted Street and the East 
Side to enlist in the crusade — a crusade against the 
vices of their own lives, in behalf of their children, 
their homes, and the republic ! And as the fire he 
kindles spreads, may some Urban appear among the 
ecclesiastical leaders, who shall discern the full sig- 
nificance of such a moral and spiritual crusade! 
May he, before the representatives of the Church 
assembled at some modern Clermont, take up the 
message and preach it with an eloquence and per- 
suasiveness that shall move the souls of all who 
hear him till they shall cry in response : "Deus vult! 
Deus vult!" And may this cry echo from council 
to council, from city to city, from village to village, 
until it shall reverberate throughout the length and 
breadth of the land! May the crusade become as 
universal as was that other crusade of a thousand 
years ago! For certain it is that God does will it. 
He wills that the millions of our people whose lives 
are under the blight of selfishness, sin, vice, and 

146 



The Social Need of a Religious Awakening 

despair may be regenerated and redeemed. He 
wills that thereby our civilization shall also be re- 
deemed from the destructive forces that menace it, 
so that the social dreams and hopes of the twentieth 
century may be realized and the Kingdom of God 
may come upon the earth. 



147 



SEP 18 1913 



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